Partitioning heritability by functional annotation using genome-wide association summary statistics

Hilary Finucane, Brendan Bulik-Sullivan, Benjamin Neale, Alkes Price and colleagues introduce a new method, called stratified LD score regression, for partitioning heritability by functional category using genome-wide association study summary statistics. They observe a substantial enrichment of heritability in conserved regions and illustrate how this approach can provide insights into the biological basis of disease and direction for functional follow-up. Recent work has demonstrated that some functional categories of the genome contribute disproportionately to the heritability of complex diseases. Here we analyze a broad set of functional elements, including cell type–specific elements, to estimate their polygenic contributions to heritability in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of 17 complex diseases and traits with an average sample size of 73,599. To enable this analysis, we introduce a new method, stratified LD score regression, for partitioning heritability from GWAS summary statistics while accounting for linked markers. This new method is computationally tractable at very large sample sizes and leverages genome-wide information. Our findings include a large enrichment of heritability in conserved regions across many traits, a very large immunological disease–specific enrichment of heritability in FANTOM5 enhancers and many cell type–specific enrichments, including significant enrichment of central nervous system cell types in the heritability of body mass index, age at menarche, educational attainment and smoking behavior.