ArticleNature communications2021
Widespread signatures of natural selection across human complex traits and functional genomic categories.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 104 papers, 6 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
104 citing papers in PubMed, 6 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Multi-ancestry genome-wide association analyses of refractive error augment genetic discovery and polygenic prediction.Nature genetics · 2026Pooled it
- Sex-stratified genome-wide association meta-analysis of major depressive disorder.Nature communications · 2025Pooled it
- Genome-wide association studies in a large Korean cohort identify quantitative trait loci for 36 traits and illuminate their genetic architectures.Nature communications · 2025Pooled it
- Pooled it
- East Asian-specific and cross-ancestry genome-wide meta-analyses provide mechanistic insights into peptic ulcer disease.Nature genetics · 2023Pooled it
- Genetic insights into human cortical organization and development through genome-wide analyses of 2,347 neuroimaging phenotypes.Nature genetics · 2023Pooled it
- All of Us diversity and scale yield context-dependent improvements in polygenic prediction.Nature genetics · 2026Article
- Sex-specific biological aging clocks across organs and omics.Nature medicine · 2026Article
- Genomic insights into natural selection in recent human history.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Genetic architectures of brain-related traits are shaped by strong selective constraints.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Correlations between causal effect sizes of proximal SNPs vary with functional annotations and implicate stabilizing selection.Nature genetics · 2026Article
- Protein-protein interaction network architecture of human polygenic traits reveals domain-spanning connectivity and evolutionary pressures.Genome biology · 2026Article
- Determinants of functional burden pleiotropy and gene dosage responses across human traits.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Methods to detect selection history in a population under ongoing directional selection.Genetics · 2026Article
- Nucleotide diversity is a poor predictor of short-term adaptive potential.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Atypical energy-related symptoms define biologically distinct subtypes of major depressive disorder.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Type 2 diabetes genetics in 125,000 admixed adults from Mexico City.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- The genetic architecture of cortical similarity networks.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Signatures of pathogen-driven selection and Austronesian gene flow of Papua New Guinea HLA alleles.American journal of human genetics · 2026Article
- Causal inference clarifies the roles of background selection and mutation rate variation in shaping human genetic diversity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
44 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding how natural selection has shaped genetic architecture of complex traits is of importance in medical and evolutionary genetics. Bayesian methods have been developed using individual-level GWAS data to estimate multiple genetic architecture parameters including selection signature. Here, we present a method (SBayesS) that only requires GWAS summary statistics. We analyse data for 155 complex traits (n = 27k-547k) and project the estimates onto those obtained from evolutionary simulations. We estimate that, on average across traits, about 1% of human genome sequence are mutational targets with a mean selection coefficient of ~0.001. Common diseases, on average, show a smaller number of mutational targets and have been under stronger selection, compared to other traits. SBayesS analyses incorporating functional annotations reveal that selection signatures vary across genomic regions, among which coding regions have the strongest selection signature and are enriched for both the number of associated variants and the magnitude of effect sizes.
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