Sex-stratified Genome-wide Association Studies Including 270,000 Individuals Show Sexual Dimorphism in Genetic Loci for Anthropometric Traits

Peer reviewe

Consistently higher effect sizes for women for all seven loci.

<p>Shown are beta-estimates and 95% confidence intervals for the seven identified SNPs (also stating the phenotype for which the SNP was selected for).</p

Genome-wide scan for sex-specific genome-wide association highlights numerous loci.

<p>(a) Manhattan plot showing the men-specific (upward, up to 60,586 men) and women-specific (downward, up to 73,137 women) association P-values from the discovery with the 619 selected loci colored by the phenotype for which the locus was selected; (b) QQ-plot showing the sex-specific association P-values as observed against those expected under the null overall phenotypes (black) and for each phenotypes separately (colored).</p

Seven identified SNPs compared to previously published loci.

a<p>The Effect allele refers to a positive effect direction in the discovery stage for the trait and gender, the SNP was selected for;</p>b<p>Gene near this SNP which was published previously from sex-combined analyses.</p><p>The seven SNPs with sex difference are considered to depict a known locus, if the index SNP is close to a published top SNP (<1 cM). These include four of the previously reported sexually dimorphic WHR loci (Heid et al., Nat Genet 2010).</p

Seven SNPs show sex difference.

a<p>Trait and sex for which the SNP was selected;</p>b<p>Gene labels state the nearest gene or the gene as published previously; details on all genes near the association signal can be found in the <a href="http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1003500#pgen.1003500.s002" target="_blank">Figure S2</a>;</p>c<p>One-sided P-Values.</p>d<p>larger sample size due to one additional study that did not have hip circumference, and therefore could not contribute to WHRadjBMI.</p>e<p>smaller sample size as this SNP was not on Metabochip.</p><p>Shown are the seven SNPs with significant (at 5% false discovery rate) sex difference in the follow-up data. These seven SNPs exhibit genome-wide significant association in women (joint discovery and follow-up <i>P_women</i><5×10−8) and only two of these show nominally significant association in men (joint <i>P_men</i><0.05). The three loci MAP3K1, HSD17B4, and PPARG are shown here for the first time for their anthropometric trait association as well as for sex-difference.</p