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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Huge trove of British biodata is unlocking secrets of depression, sexual orientation, and more [sciencemag.org]

When the Manchester-based [UK Biobank (UKB), a huge research project probing the health and genetics of 500,000 British people,] enrolled its first volunteer 13 years ago, some critics wondered whether it would be a waste of time and money. But by now, any skepticism is long gone. "It's now clear that it has been a massive success—largely because the big data they have are being made widely available," says Oxford developmental neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop, a participant. Other biobanks are bigger or collect equally detailed health data. But the UKB has both large numbers of participants and high-quality clinical information. It "allows us to do research on a scale that we've never been able to do before," says Peter Visscher, a quantitative geneticist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

The crucial ingredient, however, may be open access. Researchers around the world can freely delve into the UKB data and rapidly build on one another's work, resulting in unexpected dividends in diverse fields, such as human evolution. In a crowdsourcing spirit rare in the hypercompetitive world of biomedical research, groups even post tools for using the data without first seeking credit by publishing in a journal.

[...] The most provocative studies have probed for genetic influences on human behavior. One, published in Nature Genetics in July 2018, drew on the UKB and 23andMe to pin down genetic contributions to a person's level of education. Together, 1300 genetic markers accounted for 11% of the variability among individuals, the researchers found. That's comparable to certain environmental influences in the UKB sample, such as family income, which predicted just 7% of the variance in educational attainment among participants; and mother's education level, which predicted 15%. Another study presented at a meeting last fall found four genetic markers that appear to have a strong influence on whether a person has had sex with someone of their own sex at least once [sciencemag.org] [DOI: 10.1126/science.362.6413.385] [DX [doi.org]].

Such studies are raising concerns that genetic tests could be used to screen embryos for desired traits or discriminate against individuals with certain genetic profiles. That would be a misuse of the findings, say the researchers who identified these links. They stress that the probabilities mean little on the individual level.

Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neanderthal legacy [sciencemag.org]

[A] few years ago, [Janet] Kelso and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, turned to a new tool—the UK Biobank (UKB), a large database that holds genetic and health records for half a million British volunteers. The researchers analyzed data from 112,338 of those Britons—enough that "we could actually look and say: 'We see a Neanderthal version of the gene and we can measure its effect on phenotype in many people—how often they get sunburned, what color their hair is, and what color their eyes are,'" Kelso says. They found Neanderthal variants that boost the odds that a person smokes, is an evening person rather than a morning person, and is prone to sunburn and depression.

[...] For the UKB architects, who designed it for biomedical research, the evolutionary discoveries are an unexpected bonus. "No one was thinking about Neanderthal traits when we designed the protocol," says molecular epidemiologist Rory Collins of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who is principal investigator of the UKB. "The experiment [is] working well beyond people's expectations."

UK Biobank [wikipedia.org].

Related: Rare 'Healthy' Smokers Lungs Explained [soylentnews.org]
Study Of Nearly 300,000 People Challenges The 'Obesity Paradox' [soylentnews.org]

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