Improved heritability estimation from genome-wide SNPs

Abstract

Estimation of narrow-sense heritability, h2, from genome-wide SNPs genotyped in unrelated individuals has recently attracted interest and offers several advantages over traditional pedigree-based methods. With the use of this approach, it has been estimated that over half the heritability of human height can be attributed to the ∼300,000 SNPs on a genome-wide genotyping array. In comparison, only 5%-10% can be explained by SNPs reaching genome-wide significance. We investigated via simulation the validity of several key assumptions underpinning the mixed-model analysis used in SNP-based h 2 estimation. Although we found that the method is reasonably robust to violations of four key assumptio..