Sports-Related Genomic Predictors Are Associated with Athlete Status in Chinese Sprint/Power Athletes.

The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between variant loci significantly associated with sports-related traits in the GWAS Catalog database and sprint/power athlete status, as well as to explore the polygenic profile of elite athletes. Next-generation sequencing and microarray technology were used to genotype samples from 211 elite athletes who had achieved success in national or international competitions in power-based sports and from 522 non-athletes, who were healthy university students with no history of professional sports training. Variant loci collected from databases were extracted after imputation. Subsequently, 80% of the samples were randomly selected as the training set, and the remaining 20% as the validation set. Association analysis of variant loci was conducted in the training set, and individual Total Genotype Score (TGS) were calculated using genotype dosage and lnOR, followed by the establishment of a logistic model, with predictive performance evaluated in the validation set. Association analysis was performed on 2075 variant loci, and after removing linked loci (r > 0.2), 118 Tag SNPs ( ≤ 0.05) were identified. A logistic model built using 30 Tag SNPs ( ≤ 0.01) showed better performance in the validation set (AUC = 0.707). Our study identified 30 new genetic molecular markers and demonstrated that elite sprint/power athlete status is polygenic.