View Program - 2022 Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference

Understanding the genetic architecture of complex traits is a central challenge in human genetics. There often remains a large disparity between heritability estimates from family-based studies and large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which has been sensationalized as the “missing heritability problem”. Among the possible explanations for this disparity are rare variants of large effect that are neither tagged by existing genotyping platforms nor well imputed from existing reference panels. In this talk, I will discuss how historical and recent evolutionary forces shape the distribution of genetic variants in the genome, as well as the population genetic conditions in which these evolutionary forces impact the genetic architecture of complex traits. I will also discuss how dynamic admixture processes shape patterns of genetic ancestry in Latiné populations, which may be contributing to a shifting genetic architecture of complex traits in these populations.

Evolutionary forces shape the genetic architecture of complex traits