Mega-analysis of 31,396 individuals from 6 countries uncovers strong gene-environment interaction for human fertility
By
Felix C. Tropf,
Renske M Verweij,
Peter J van der Most,
Gert Stulp,
Andrew Bakshi,
Daniel A. Briley,
Matthew Robinson,
Anastasia Numan,
Tõnu Esko,
Andres Metspalu,
Sarah E. Medland,
Nicholas G Martin,
Harold Snieder,
Sang Hong Lee,
Melinda C Mills
Posted 18 Apr 2016
bioRxiv DOI: 10.1101/049163
(published DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0195-1)
Family and twin studies suggest that up to 50% of individual differences in human fertility within a population might be heritable. However, it remains unclear whether the genes associated with fertility outcomes such as number of children ever born (NEB) or age at first birth (AFB) are the same across geographical and historical environments. By not taking this into account, previous genetic studies implicitly assumed that the genetic effects are constant across time and space. We conduct a mega-analysis applying whole genome methods on 31,396 unrelated men and women from six Western countries. Across all individuals and environments, common single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) explained only ~4% of the variance in NEB and AFB. We then extend these models to test whether genetic effects are shared across different environments or unique to them. For individuals belonging to the same population and demographic cohort (born before or after the 20th century fertility decline), SNP-based heritability was almost five times higher at 22% for NEB and 19% for AFB. We also found no evidence suggesting that genetic effects on fertility are shared across time and space. Our findings imply that the environment strongly modifies genetic effects on the tempo and quantum of fertility, that currently ongoing natural selection is heterogeneous across environments, and that gene-environment interactions may partly account for missing heritability in fertility. Future research needs to combine efforts from genetic research and from the social sciences to better understand human fertility.
Download data
- Downloaded 1,025 times
- Download rankings, all-time:
- Site-wide: 19,065
- In genomics: 1,957
- Year to date:
- Site-wide: 72,033
- Since beginning of last month:
- Site-wide: 98,217
Altmetric data
Downloads over time
Distribution of downloads per paper, site-wide
PanLingua
News
- 27 Nov 2020: The website and API now include results pulled from medRxiv as well as bioRxiv.
- 18 Dec 2019: We're pleased to announce PanLingua, a new tool that enables you to search for machine-translated bioRxiv preprints using more than 100 different languages.
- 21 May 2019: PLOS Biology has published a community page about Rxivist.org and its design.
- 10 May 2019: The paper analyzing the Rxivist dataset has been published at eLife.
- 1 Mar 2019: We now have summary statistics about bioRxiv downloads and submissions.
- 8 Feb 2019: Data from Altmetric is now available on the Rxivist details page for every preprint. Look for the "donut" under the download metrics.
- 30 Jan 2019: preLights has featured the Rxivist preprint and written about our findings.
- 22 Jan 2019: Nature just published an article about Rxivist and our data.
- 13 Jan 2019: The Rxivist preprint is live!