USC Center for Genetic Epidemiology Seminar – How much heritability are we still missing?

The Center for Genetic Epidemiology is hosting a virtual seminar with. Dr Loic Yengo, Professor of Statistical Genomics at The University of Queensland (UQ). His lab at UQ investigates the causes and consequences of genetic variation within and between human populations and develops and applies novel statistical methods to analyse large volumes of genomic data. Loic’s research has contributed to improve understanding of the genetic and phenotypic consequences of non-random mating (inbreeding and assortative mating) in human populations, and has led to identify novel genetic variants associated with complex traits and diseases. Loic was the 2022 recipient of the Ruth Stephens Gani Medal of the Australian Academy of Science recognizing outstanding contributions to research in human genetics, and the 2024 recipient of the American Society of Human Genetics Early Career Award. In 2024, he was awarded a Snow Medical Research Foundation Fellowship to accelerate the deployment of genomic risk prediction in the clinic and improve the benefit of genomic medicine in under-represented populations.

Dr Yengo will revisit the long standing question of the missing heritability through two recent studies. The first study estimates the heritability of complex traits and diseases using within-family segregation in 120,000 siblings pairs and, the other study focuses on whole genome sequences of 350,000 unrelated individuals. His research shows convergence between these two approaches and highlight that a substantial amount of the rare-variant heritability of lipids can already mapped to specific loci.