ArticlePLoS genetics2020
Estimating indirect parental genetic effects on offspring phenotypes using virtual parental genotypes derived from sibling and half sibling pairs.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
- Imputing Parental Genotypes Through Mendelian Imputation: Ethical and Legal Considerations.Behavior genetics · 2026Review
- Systematically improving the efficiency of complex kinship identification through the addition of genetic markers and reference individuals.International journal of legal medicine · 2025Article
- Investigating the Relationship Between Maternal Smoking During Pregnancy and Offspring Handedness: Extending the Proxy Gene-by-Environment Mendelian Randomization Study Design to Include Polygenic Risk Scores.Behavior genetics · 2025Article
- Woolf et al's "GWAS by subtraction" is not useful for cross-generational Mendelian randomization studies.BMC research notes · 2025Article
- Reconstructing parent genomes using siblings and other relatives.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- What are the contributions of maternal and paternal traits to fecundity and offspring development? A case study in an amphibian species, the spined toadCurrent zoology · 2023Article
- Preliminary Evidence for Genetic Nurture in Depression and Neuroticism Through Polygenic Scores.JAMA psychiatry · 2023Article
- Annual Research Review: Towards a deeper understanding of nature and nurture: combining family-based quasi-experimental methods with genomic data.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2023Review
- Do environmental effects indexed by parental genetic variation influence common psychiatric symptoms in childhood?Translational psychiatry · 2023Article
- Using Genomic Structural Equation Modeling to Partition the Genetic Covariance Between Birthweight and Cardiometabolic Risk Factors into Maternal and Offspring Components in the Norwegian HUNT Study.Behavior genetics · 2023Article
- Decomposing heritability and genetic covariance by direct and indirect effect paths.PLoS genetics · 2023Article
- Assessing the contribution of genetic nurture to refractive error.European journal of human genetics : EJHG · 2022Article
- Simultaneous inference of parental admixture proportions and admixture times from unphased local ancestry calls.American journal of human genetics · 2022Article
- Article
- Evaluating indirect genetic effects of siblings using singletons.PLoS genetics · 2022Article
- Mendelian imputation of parental genotypes improves estimates of direct genetic effects.Nature genetics · 2022Article
- Within-sibship genome-wide association analyses decrease bias in estimates of direct genetic effects.Nature genetics · 2022Article
- Article
- Estimating genetic nurture with summary statistics of multigenerational genome-wide association studies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Modeling Parent-Specific Genetic Nurture in Families with Missing Parental Genotypes: Application to Birthweight and BMI.Behavior genetics · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 4 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Indirect parental genetic effects may be defined as the influence of parental genotypes on offspring phenotypes over and above that which results from the transmission of genes from parents to their children. However, given the relative paucity of large-scale family-based cohorts around the world, it is difficult to demonstrate parental genetic effects on human traits, particularly at individual loci. In this manuscript, we illustrate how parental genetic effects on offspring phenotypes, including late onset conditions, can be estimated at individual loci in principle using large-scale genome-wide association study (GWAS) data, even in the absence of parental genotypes. Our strategy involves creating "virtual" mothers and fathers by estimating the genotypic dosages of parental genotypes using physically genotyped data from relative pairs. We then utilize the expected dosages of the parents, and the actual genotypes of the offspring relative pairs, to perform conditional genetic association analyses to obtain asymptotically unbiased estimates of maternal, paternal and offspring genetic effects. We apply our approach to 19066 sibling pairs from the UK Biobank and show that a polygenic score consisting of imputed parental educational attainment SNP dosages is strongly related to offspring educational attainment even after correcting for offspring genotype at the same loci. We develop a freely available web application that quantifies the power of our approach using closed form asymptotic solutions. We implement our methods in a user-friendly software package IMPISH (IMputing Parental genotypes In Siblings and Half Siblings) which allows users to quickly and efficiently impute parental genotypes across the genome in large genome-wide datasets, and then use these estimated dosages in downstream linear mixed model association analyses. We conclude that imputing parental genotypes from relative pairs may provide a useful adjunct to existing large-scale genetic studies of parents and their offspring.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.