Accurate Genomic Prediction of Human Height
biorxiv.org
biorxiv.org
Much work left to do though, and there are interesting methods being developed in this space
Would you mind posting any relevant links? Is there general agreement in the field that more data is the solution?
Would be nice if you could predict the height of your kids at a young age.
Yes.
> and find the SNPs and calculate on your own?
No. I'm not sure Lello et al have released the polygenic score in question.
> Would be nice if you could predict the height of your kids at a young age.
You can already do that with Galton's midpoint regression method (indeed, he invented the entire method of regression based on predicting children's heights from their parents!). What you could do is predict which sibling will be taller, though.
It's not direct genetic engineering yet, but we're pretty much already in Gattaca.
So relax, we have plenty of dystopia without designer babies.
Algorithm is actually painfully simple. Just relying on massive data (500K individuals)
Would it?
(You can also give them your actual height so they can improve their data set)
You upload your dna from 23andme to them and they give you a full report without government interference.
This seems very low, almost like saying genes don't have any practical predictive power, right ?
We've seen average height go up tremendously in places like Japan based on improved nutrition.
To speak of the influence of genes also assumes a certain environment. If we look at western populations for example, the heritability of height in adulthood is something like 0.8. But this is predicated on that western environment where ~nobody has nutritional deficiencies. A uniform, high-quality environment means that there is little besides genes that can influence height. If something happened and a large portion of the population had such deficiencies, the influence of genes would be diminished.
> Heritability scores are relevant only to the environments in which the traits have been studied. The more environments you study a trait in, the lower the heritability is likely to be.
He goes on for several pages, describing the ways the surrounding environment can change an organism's gene expression, and I think this quote best summarizes his point:
> Here’s a rule of thumb for recognizing gene/environment interactions, translated into English: You are studying the behavioral effects of a gene in two environments. Someone asks, “What are the effects of the gene on some behavior?” You answer, “It depends on the environment.” Then they ask, “What are the effects of environment on this behavior?” And you answer, “It depends on the version of the gene.” “It depends” = a gene/environment interaction.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1...
Oh, and lets not forget that again this is only point mutations (SNPs). But there are also genomic insertions, deletions, larger structural variants and poly variant interactions, all of which we do not really have much idea about or even the tech available to accurately measure.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-of-human... "The short answer to this question is that about 60 to 80 percent of the difference in height between individuals is determined by genetic factors, whereas 20 to 40 percent can be attributed to environmental effects, mainly nutrition."
Or let me put it this way: how much do siblings (ie embryos) vary in height? It's by quite a bit, often several inches. Most of this is due to genetics. And this PGS is able to predict half of the genetic contribution. So...
(If you're curious, my best estimate is that embryo selection could boost height by about an inch on average.)
> filtering embryos for the right genetic background would also be incredibly expensive and probably impossible
It would cost about $2000 for the biopsies and SNP arrays of the usual ~5 embryos, and can be done either now or in the next few years and could have been done years ago if any real effort was put into it.
On the other hand, if you sampled millions of embryos, you could find the rare few predicted to grow to be 6'5" person -- but this would be very expensive and basically impossible without synthetic embryos.
Yes, and this is cheap and does lead to gains. (Specifically: around 1 inch.)
> but this would be very expensive and basically impossible without synthetic embryos.
First, this is not remotely what you said. Second, it's not true: you only need more eggs and they don't have to be 'synthetic' whatever that means, and there's a lot of work on inducing egg development from stem cells so in another 10 years it may well be possible for parents to do massive selection like that. Third, you don't need millions of embryos if you just want a very tall person, as the advantage is cumulative over generations (which is the critical insight behind Iterated Embryo Selection: it's much more efficient to take a few hundred embryos through multiple generations of selection than it is to try to brute force a single selective step). That's omitting any gains from CRISPR or genome synthesis or other methods not yet thought of. Fourth, why would any parent want that in the first place as that's into the realm of potential healthy problems (even if we're assuming only male embryos) and beyond the useful level of height advantages, especially when they could be instead spending that count of embryos to maximize a weighted sum of all health and other complex traits? (Remember, just because everyone talks about doing embryo selection on a single trait at a time doesn't make that remotely a good idea; there are big gains to selecting on many traits simultaneously.)
No. Who knows what the future will bring, though? There's already some neat new CRISPR-based methods for detecting DNA and viruses etc which were published the other day.