Heritability measures the proportion of trait variation that is due to genetic inheritance. Measurement of heritability is important in the nature-versus-nurture debate. However, existing estimates of heritability may be biased by environmental effects. Here, we introduce relatedness disequilibrium regression (RDR), a novel method for estimating heritability. RDR avoids most sources of environmental bias by exploiting variation in relatedness due to random Mendelian segregation. We used a sample of 54,888 Icelanders who had both parents genotyped to estimate the heritability of 14 traits, including height (55.4%, s.e. 4.4%) and educational attainment (17.0%, s.e. 9.4%). Our results suggest that some other estimates of heritability may be inflated by environmental effects.
Journal article
2018-09-01T00:00:00+00:00
50
1304 - 1310
6
deCODE genetics/Amgen Inc., Reykjavik, Iceland. alexander.young@bdi.ox.ac.uk.
Humans, Environment, Genotype, Quantitative Trait, Heritable, Linkage Disequilibrium, Phenotype, Models, Genetic, Iceland, Genetic Variation, Gene-Environment Interaction