QBI Neuroscience Seminar: 'The genetics of educational attainment'

Event Details

Date:

Wednesday, 07 November 2018 - Wednesday, 07 November 2018

Time:

11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Room:

QBI Level 7 Auditorium

UQ Location:

Queensland Brain Institute (St Lucia)

URL:

http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/neuroscience-seminars

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Professor Peter Visscher FRS
Program in Complex Trait Genomics
Institute for Molecular Bioscience, and Queensland Brain Institute
University of Queensland

Title: 'The genetics of educational attainment'
Abstract: Educational attainment ranges from completion of high school through to PhD graduation and reflects a complex mixture of factors such as intelligence, perseverance, resilience and opportunity. Variation between people in the number of years of schooling is (therefore) attributable to both environmental and genetic factors. Twin studies have implied that about 20-40% of variation is genetic and we now have the tools and data to dissect this variation into contributions from individual genetic loci and to study their biology. I will show results from a genome-wide association study of more than 1 million individuals, from which >1200 associated loci were detected, implicating genes involved in brain-development processes and neuron-to-neuron communication. A joint multi-phenotype analysis of educational attainment and related cognitive phenotypes generates polygenic scores that explain 11–13% of the variance in educational attainment and 7–10% of the variance in cognitive performance. This prediction accuracy substantially increases the utility of polygenic scores as tools in research.