Fine-scale population structure in the UK Biobank: implications for genome-wide association studies.

Human Molecular Genetics
James P CookAndrew P Morris

Abstract

The UK Biobank is a prospective study of more than 500 000 participants, which has aggregated data from questionnaires, physical measures, biomarkers, imaging and follow-up for a wide range of health-related outcomes, together with genome-wide genotyping supplemented with high-density imputation. Previous studies have highlighted fine-scale population structure in the UK on a North-West to South-East cline, but the impact of unmeasured geographical confounding on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of complex human traits in the UK Biobank has not been investigated. We considered 368 325 white British individuals from the UK Biobank and performed GWAS of their birth location. We demonstrate that widely used approaches to adjust for population structure, including principal component analysis and mixed modelling with a random effect for a genetic relationship matrix, cannot fully account for the fine-scale geographical confounding in the UK Biobank. We observe significant genetic correlation of birth location with a range of lifestyle-related traits, including body-mass index and fat mass, hypertension and lung function, even after adjustment for population structure. Variants driving associations with birth location are also...Continue Reading

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