Breakthrough! Genetics of a Polygenic Trait Revealed!

[J11]

This is a fundamentally important step forward for genetic science.
For the first time a highly polygenic trait has been genetically solved.

Below article found a method to reveal essentially all of the common SNPs
for heritability of height. The method used, Lasso L1 regression.

Now that this has been shown to be an effective tool, it could be equally applied to
many other traits and diseases including Alzheimer's. In fact, AD appears to be an
especially attractive candidate for Lassoing. AD has highish heritability possibly
up to ~0.80 and might be somewhat sparser than height. The effect size distribution
also appears flatter which in some respects would be helpful.

One of the great parts of all this is that we would now have common sense on our side.
Up to this point GWAS research has not been highly directed by a strong rationale in
terms of allocation of scarce resources. Money would be spent; the GWAS would not
be successful and then more money would be spent and more money .... GWAS were
bottomless money pits that for many years never produced any results that replicated.

With this new Compressed Sensing science with a measurable transition boundary, it is
possible to determine what size of GWAS will be needed and predict when all of the SNPs would
be found. AD should have a firmish transition boundary which would help limit the size of the
GWAS and allow for very accurate beta estimation.

When these GWAS are done for AD, it would be expected that all common SNPs measuring perhaps
ten thousand plus would be found. The height study found 20,000 plus SNPs.

http://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/ ... 4.full.pdf

[circular]

Interesting!

[SusanJ]

Glad to see that access to large data sets might begin to pay off in very useful ways. Let's hope you're right and someone tackles the AD arena next.