ESHG 2014: Genomic description of the Generation Scotland Cohort: a large family base genetic study

Title: P17.29-S - Genomic description of the Generation Scotland Cohort: a large family base genetic study
Keywords: Genetic introgression; Principal Component Analysis; GS:SFHS
Authors: C. Amador1, J. Huffman1, H. Trochet1, A. Campbell1, D. Porteous1, G. Scotland1, N. Hastie1, V. Vitart1, C. Hayward1, P. Navarro1, C. S. Haley1,2; 1MRC IGMM, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, 2Roslin Institute and Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

Abstract: Generation Scotland’s Scottish Family Health Study (GS:SFHS) includes over 24,000 participants from across Scotland with records for health-related traits and environmental covariates, 10,000 genotyped for ~700K SNPs. The cohort represents an important resource for the study of complex traits and diseases. We have analysed the genomic structure of GS:SFHS as a preliminary step towards choosing appropriate subsets of individuals and statistical techniques for future studies. Initially we merged the GS:SFHS data with 1092 individuals of diverse ancestries from the 1000 Genomes project and estimated genomic relationships using the ~700K SNPs. A Principal Component Analysis on the resulting relationships facilitated identification of a group of 70 individuals of likely Italian ancestry and a number of individuals with African or Asian ancestry. We characterised the amount of genetic introgression and were able to differentiate between individuals with a few small exogenous regions in their genome, and those with long exogenous haplotypes covering a large part of the genome. We found that the pattern of homozygosity was very similar to that of other European populations and identified an individual carrying a chromosome 1 uniparental disomy. Overall, there is very limited evidence for geographic differentiation or stratification of the GS:SFHS sample within Scotland. These findings provide a genomic perspective on the history of the Scottish population, and have implications for further analyses, such as studying the contributions of common and rare variants to trait heritabilities and evaluation of genomic and phenotypic prediction of disease.