BICB Colloquium: Arslan Zaidi

BICB Colloquium Faculty Nomination Talks: Join us in person on the UMR campus in room 414, on the Twin Cities campus in MCB 2-122 or virtually at 5 p.m.

 

Arslan Zaidi is an Assistant Professor Institute for Health Informatics UMN. They will be giving a talk titled, "Interpreting heritability in admixed populations".

 

Heritability is a fundamental concept in human genetics. Defined (in the narrow sense) as the proportion of phenotypic variance that is due to additive genetic effects, it is central to our ability to describe and make inferences about genetic variation underlying complex traits. For example, both the power to discover variants in genome-wide association studies and the upper limit of polygenic prediction accuracy are functions of heritability, making it important for the design of genetic studies. However, heritability is often estimated assuming the population is randomly mating, which is almost never true, especially in admixed and multi-ethnic cohorts. In this seminar, I will use theory and simulations to describe the behavior of heritability in admixed populations and evaluate the effect of the 'random mating' assumption on heritability estimation. I will discuss the implications of these results for genome-wide association studies, polygenic prediction, and our understand of the genetic architecture of complex traits.