13th Annual IGSS Conference • September 30-October 1, 2022

Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences 2022

Quantifying portable genetic effects and improving cross-ancestry genetic prediction with GWAS summary statistics

Qiongshi Lu, Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Polygenic risk scores (PRS) calculated from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of Europeans are known to have substantially reduced predictive accuracy in non-European populations, limiting its clinical utility and raising concerns about health disparities across ancestral populations. Here, we introduce a novel statistical framework named X-Wing to improve predictive performance in ancestrally diverse populations. X-Wing quantifies local genetic correlations for complex traits between populations, employs a novel annotation-dependent estimation procedure to amplify correlated genetic effects between populations, and combines multiple population-specific PRS into a unified score with GWAS summary statistics alone as input. Through extensive benchmarking, we demonstrate that X-Wing pinpoints portable genetic effects and substantially improves PRS performance in non-European populations, showing 18.7 gain in predictive R2 compared to state-of-the-art methods based on GWAS summary statistics. Overall, X-Wing addresses critical limitations in existing approaches and may have broad applications in cross-population polygenic prediction.

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