“Population genetics and evolution of complex traits: a Mexican cohort”

Latin America continues to be severely underrepresented in genomics research, and fine-scale genetic histories as well as complex trait architectures remain hidden due to the lack of sufficient data. To fill this gap, the Mexican Biobank project genotyped 6,057 individuals from 898 sampling localities across all 32 states in Mexico at 1.8 million genome-wide markers with linked complex trait and disease information creating a valuable nationwide genotype-phenotype database. Through a suite of state-of-the-art methods for ancestry deconvolution and inference of identity-by-descent (IBD) segments, we inferred detailed ancestral histories across varied Mesoamerican regions, unraveling native, colonial, and post-colonial demographic dynamics. We observed large variations in runs of homozygosity (ROH) among genomic regions with different ancestries reflecting their demographic histories, which also affect the distribution of rare deleterious variants across Mexico. We computed genome-wide association analysis (GWAS) summary statistics for 22 binary and quantitative traits, and show that traits such as triglycerides, glucose, creatinine and cholesterol are better predicted using our MXB GWAS compared to UKB GWAS. We further identified significant genetic and environmental factors explaining complex trait variation, such as ROH found to be a significant predictor for trait variation in BMI, triglycerides, glucose and height. This study provides new insights into the demographic history of indigenous groups in Mexico, and dissects their complex trait architecture crucial for making precision and preventative medicine initiatives a reality.

Conferencia presencial en el Auditorio del ICF, videoconferencia vía Zoom con transmisión vía Youtube: bit.ly/YouTube_ICF

Participante: Dra. Mashaal Sohail

Institución: Centro de Ciencias Genómicas, UNAM

Fecha y hora: Este evento terminó el Miércoles, 01 de Febrero de 2023