Today parents can, for the first time, access polygenic embryo testing for IQ and many diseases through a routine test (PGT-A) done worldwide and in 60% of US IVF cycles.

Read on to learn how Herasight’s ImputePGTA algorithm is enabling polygenic testing in IVF to go global. 🧵 Done IVF or considering IVF? Sign up here:

Herasight has already served people from 11 countries across Europe, North America, and Asia.

Now we’re offering a 90% discount to the first qualified customer from each country in the world (T&Cs apply). herasight.com/get-early-acce…

New from Wang, Visscher et al. (incl. me): in the Mexico City Prospective Study, we find that causal, within-family effects explain ~all of the association between indigenous American (IAM) ancestry and height and type-2 diabetes but ~none of the association with education🧵 The study uses a sample of 17,627 families from the Mexico City Prospective Study (MCPS), which vary in their proportions of genetic ancestry from European (EUR), Indigenous American (IAM), and, to a lesser degree, African (AFR) and East Asian (EAS) sources.

At @herasight, we wanted to compare our genetic predictors (PGS) to those from @nucleusgenomics. However, in many cases, we couldn’t reconcile plausible performance of their PGSs with customer risk reports we saw — this may have misled customers about their disease risks. Nine of their PGSs appeared to be open-source models from PGS catalog. Many (see table) relied on small numbers of variants despite being for polygenic diseases. State of the art PGS typically use thousands or millions of variants to maximize predictive ability.

The table gives our liability scale R^2 (a measure of PGS prediction performance) back-engineered from customer reports, along with the number of variants used in the PGS, and the R^2 we achieved in our independent validation in UKBB.

I’ve been working with an IVF startup, @herasight, that has already screened hundreds of embryos. Today we come out of stealth with a paper showing that our predictors for 17 diseases — validated within-family — beat the competition, with improved performance in non-Europeans🧵 Check out our website where you can play with our widget and download our white paper: herasight.com

New educational attainment (EA) GWAS out today: nature.com/articles/s4158…. We expand the sample size from ~1 million to ~3 million, making it one of the largest GWAS to date. We identify more loci affecting EA and increase our ability to predict EA from genetic data, and more...🧵 First, some background: educational attainment (EA) measures the number of years of education an individual completes, information that is routinely collected by researchers in many fields, and is strongly related to many socioeconomic and health outcomes.

New from Richard Border @andywdahl @flint Noah Zaitlen myself & others. Estimated genetic correlations between traits may be inflated by cross-trait assortative mating (xAM): . So are apparent genetic relationships between traits a statistical artefact? 🧵biorxiv.org/content/10.110… The genetic correlation between two traits is usually interpreted as a measure of the degree to which the genetic effects on one trait are correlated with the genetic effects on the other, i.e. shared underlying biology. However, this interpretation is not valid when there is xAM