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Genome-wide association studies of brain imaging phenotypes in UK Biobank.

Lloyd T Elliott | Kevin Sharp | Fidel Alfaro-Almagro | Sinan Shi | Karla L Miller | Gwenaëlle Douaud | Jonathan Marchini | Stephen M Smith
Nature | 2018

The genetic architecture of brain structure and function is largely unknown. To investigate this, we carried out genome-wide association studies of 3,144 functional and structural brain imaging phenotypes from UK Biobank (discovery dataset 8,428 subjects). Here we show that many of these phenotypes are heritable. We identify 148 clusters of associations between single nucleotide polymorphisms and imaging phenotypes that replicate at P < 0.05, when we would expect 21 to replicate by chance. Notable significant, interpretable associations include: iron transport and storage genes, related to magnetic susceptibility of subcortical brain tissue; extracellular matrix and epidermal growth factor genes, associated with white matter micro-structure and lesions; genes that regulate mid-line axon development, associated with organization of the pontine crossing tract; and overall 17 genes involved in development, pathway signalling and plasticity. Our results provide insights into the genetic architecture of the brain that are relevant to neurological and psychiatric disorders, brain development and ageing.

Pubmed ID: 30305740

Research resources used in this publication

None found

Antibodies used in this publication

None found

Associated grants

  • Agency: Wellcome Trust, United Kingdom
    Id: 202788/Z/16/Z
  • Agency: Medical Research Council, United Kingdom
    Id: MC_PC_17228
  • Agency: Medical Research Council, United Kingdom
    Id: MC_QA137853
  • Agency: Medical Research Council, United Kingdom
    Id: MR/K006673/1

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This is a list of tools and resources that we have found mentioned in this publication.


PLINK (tool)

RRID:SCR_001757

Open source whole genome association analysis toolset, designed to perform range of basic, large scale analyses in computationally efficient manner. Used for analysis of genotype/phenotype data. Through integration with gPLINK and Haploview, there is some support for subsequent visualization, annotation and storage of results. PLINK 1.9 is improved and second generation of the software.

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FreeSurfer (tool)

RRID:SCR_001847

Open source software suite for processing and analyzing human brain MRI images. Used for reconstruction of brain cortical surface from structural MRI data, and overlay of functional MRI data onto reconstructed surface. Contains automatic structural imaging stream for processing cross sectional and longitudinal data. Provides anatomical analysis tools, including: representation of cortical surface between white and gray matter, representation of the pial surface, segmentation of white matter from rest of brain, skull stripping, B1 bias field correction, nonlinear registration of cortical surface of individual with stereotaxic atlas, labeling of regions of cortical surface, statistical analysis of group morphometry differences, and labeling of subcortical brain structures.Operating System: Linux, macOS.

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Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (tool)

RRID:SCR_004495

Consortium conducting meta-analyses of genome-wide genetic data for psychiatric disease. Focused on autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia nervosa (AN), Tourette syndrome (TS), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Used to investigate common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyped on commercial arrays, structural variation (copy number variation) and uncommon or rare genetic variation. To participate you are asked to upload data from your study to central computer used by this consortium. Genetic Cluster Computer serves as data warehouse and analytical platform for this study . When data from your study have been incorporated, account will be provided on central server and access to all GWAS genotypes, phenotypes, and meta-analytic results relevant to deposited data and participation aims. NHGRI GWAS Catalog contains updated information about all GWAS in biomedicine, and is usually excellent starting point to find comprehensive list of studies. Files can be obtained by any PGC member for any disease to which they contributed data. These files can also be obtained by application to NIMH Genetics Repository. Individual-level genotype and phenotype data requires application, material transfer agreement, and informed consent consideration. Some datasets are also in controlled-access dbGaP and Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium repositories. PGC members can also receive back cleaned and imputed data and results for samples they contributed to PGC analyses.

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1000 Genomes Project and AWS (tool)

RRID:SCR_008801

A dataset containing the full genomic sequence of 1,700 individuals, freely available for research use. The 1000 Genomes Project is an international research effort coordinated by a consortium of 75 companies and organizations to establish the most detailed catalogue of human genetic variation. The project has grown to 200 terabytes of genomic data including DNA sequenced from more than 1,700 individuals that researchers can now access on AWS for use in disease research free of charge. The dataset containing the full genomic sequence of 1,700 individuals is now available to all via Amazon S3. The data can be found at: http://s3.amazonaws.com/1000genomes The 1000 Genomes Project aims to include the genomes of more than 2,662 individuals from 26 populations around the world, and the NIH will continue to add the remaining genome samples to the data collection this year. Public Data Sets on AWS provide a centralized repository of public data hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The data can be seamlessly accessed from AWS services such Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), which provide organizations with the highly scalable compute resources needed to take advantage of these large data collections. AWS is storing the public data sets at no charge to the community. Researchers pay only for the additional AWS resources they need for further processing or analysis of the data. All 200 TB of the latest 1000 Genomes Project data is available in a publicly available Amazon S3 bucket. You can access the data via simple HTTP requests, or take advantage of the AWS SDKs in languages such as Ruby, Java, Python, .NET and PHP. Researchers can use the Amazon EC2 utility computing service to dive into this data without the usual capital investment required to work with data at this scale. AWS also provides a number of orchestration and automation services to help teams make their research available to others to remix and reuse. Making the data available via a bucket in Amazon S3 also means that customers can crunch the information using Hadoop via Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and take advantage of the growing collection of tools for running bioinformatics job flows, such as CloudBurst and Crossbow.

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FaST LMM (tool)

RRID:SCR_015506

FaST-LMM (Factored Spectrally Transformed Linear Mixed Models) is a set of tools for efficiently performing genome-wide association studies (GWAS), prediction, and heritability estimation on large data sets.

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