The Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits through the Lens of Multi-Ancestry Genetic Studies, Loic Yengo

To date, >90% of participants in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have European ancestries, which has resulted in poor portability of genetic associations to other groups. Nevertheless, the number and size of multi-ancestry GWAS have continuously grown over the past 15 years with the promise to deliver insights that could not be discovered otherwise. In this presentation, we will discuss how multi-ancestry genetic studies have improved our understanding of the genetic architecture of complex traits, defined here as the joint distribution of frequencies and effect sizes of causal variants. Specifically, we will revisit evidence supporting that causal variants and their effect sizes are largely shared between human populations, discuss current limitations of that evidence and lay out future directions for
multi-ancestry studies.