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Ancestry

Definition
AI-generated

Genetic ancestry describes the proportion of an individual’s genome inherited from specified source populations (e.g. European, African, East Asian) or along continuous axes of variation.

Topics
Ethics, law & society
Related
Admixture Admixture Mapping Ethnicity

Why it matters in GWAS

Ancestry correlates with allele frequencies and environment; mismatch or uncorrected stratification biases associations, while ancestry-aware analyses improve portability of polygenic scores across groups.

Example usage

"We restricted to individuals with >90% European ancestry by projection onto 1KG references."

Admixture Admixture Mapping Ethnicity Fixation index (FST) Fixation Index Gene Flow Local Ancestry Polygenic Risk Score Portability Population Stratification Principal Component Analysis (PCA) Race Relatedness and Sample Structure Trans-Ancestry GWAS 1000 Genomes Project
Related-term network

Click any node to open that term page.

Node order. The current term is first. Next come every page linked from Related terms, in the same top-to-bottom order as that list. Then new terms appear in two-hop layers: for each of those direct neighbors (in that same order), their related terms are appended if not already listed. A third pass does the same for two-hop nodes. The walk stops when a fixed maximum number of nodes is reached.

References

  • Kachuri L, Chatterjee N, Hirbo J, et al. (2024). Principles and methods for transferring polygenic risk scores across global populations. Nat Rev Genet. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41576-023-00637-2
  • Price AL, Zaitlen NA, Reich D, Patterson N. (2015). New approaches to population stratification in genome-wide association studies. Nat Rev Genet.
← Ancestral allele Ancestry-informative marker (AIM) →

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