查看文章

Background

Many genetics studies exclude admixed individuals due to the challenges of accounting for their ancestry such that population substructure can bias results. This is especially problematic for psychiatric disorders including PTSD, which has many sufferers of admixed descent and is extremely polygenic, meaning that accounting for local ancestral dosage is key to understand the genetic contribution of the many component sites of small effect that combine to result in the disorder.

Methods

Here, we present a novel framework to account for this issue, incorporate fine-scale population structure and improve phasing in admixed individuals, allowing them to be studied alongside homogenous samples by correcting for local ancestry. Incorporating local ancestry in addition to PCs accounts for subtle differences in admixture patterns that may differ among case and control cohorts, even if global ancestry fractions …