ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
The distribution of highly deleterious variants across human ancestry groups.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dynamics of mutators of arbitrary dominance in humans.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Allele frequencies at recessive disease genes are mainly determined by pleiotropic effects in heterozygotes.Genetics · 2026Article
- Article
- A sibling study of variation in parental mutation rates.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Assembling unmapped reads reveals hidden variation in South Asian genomes.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Multiple-testing corrections in case-control studies using identity-by-descent segments.American journal of human genetics · 2026Article
- Ancestry-specific performance of variant effect predictors in clinical variant classification.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Allele Frequencies at Recessive Disease Genes are Mainly Determined by Pleiotropic Effects in Heterozygotes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Multiple-testing corrections in case-control studies using identity-by-descent segments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Study design and the sampling of deleterious rare variants in biobank-scale datasets.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A major focus of human genetics is to map severe disease mutations. Increasingly, that goal is understood as requiring huge numbers of people to be sequenced from every broadly defined genetic ancestry group, so as not to miss "ancestry-specific variants." Here, we consider whether this focus is warranted. We start from first principles considerations, based on models of mutation-drift-selection balance, which suggest that since severe disease mutations tend to be strongly deleterious, and thus evolutionarily young, they will be kept at relatively constant frequency through recurrent mutation. Therefore, highly pathogenic alleles should be shared identically by descent within extended families, not broad ancestry groups, and sequencing more people should yield similar numbers regardless of ancestry. We test the model predictions using gnomAD genetic ancestry groupings and show that they provide a good fit to the classes of variants most likely to be highly pathogenic, notably sets of loss of function alleles at strongly constrained genes. These findings clarify that strongly deleterious alleles will be found at comparable rates in people of all ancestries, and the information they provide about human biology is shared across ancestries.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.