کد مقاله | کد نشریه | سال انتشار | مقاله انگلیسی | نسخه تمام متن |
---|---|---|---|---|
5042177 | 1474257 | 2016 | 6 صفحه PDF | دانلود رایگان |
- Educational attainment (EA) shows high levels of assortative mating
- Polygenic scores for EA significantly predict own EA and the EA of the spouse
- Polygenic scores for EA significantly correlate between spouses, indicating that assortment for EA is reflected in the genome
We examined whether assortative mating for educational attainment (“like marries like”) can be detected in the genomes of ~ 1600 UK spouse pairs of European descent. Assortative mating on heritable traits like educational attainment increases the genetic variance and heritability of the trait in the population, which may increase social inequalities. We test for genetic assortative mating in the UK on educational attainment, a phenotype that is indicative of socio-economic status and has shown substantial levels of assortative mating. We use genome-wide allelic effect sizes from a large genome-wide association study on educational attainment (N ~ 300 k) to create polygenic scores that are predictive of educational attainment in our independent sample (r = 0.23, p < 2 Ã 10â 16). The polygenic scores significantly predict partners' educational outcome (r = 0.14, p = 4 Ã 10â 8 and r = 0.19, p = 2 Ã 10â 14, for prediction from males to females and vice versa, respectively), and are themselves significantly correlated between spouses (r = 0.11, p = 7 Ã 10â 6). Our findings provide molecular genetic evidence for genetic assortative mating on education in the UK.
Journal: Intelligence - Volume 59, NovemberâDecember 2016, Pages 103-108