Assortative mating in european human populations; “finanziato dall’Unione europea – Next Generation EU”

The ARGONAUT project aims at detecting genetic assortative mating (GAM) for complex traits belonging to four major categories (Anthropometrics and pigmentation; Educational attainment; Reproductive behavior; Subjective well being) in up to 600.000 individuals from the UK Biobank and the Estonian Biobank. ARGONAUT is run by three Research Unit from the Universities of Padova, Torino and Bologna, with expertise in Molecular Anthropology, Computational Genomics and Sociogenetics, respectively, and led by Prof. Luca Pagani (UniPd). Short term GAM, the one that occurred in the parental generation of the tested individuals, will be investigated using methods designed to rely on single genomes rather than on family trios. In particular, the similarity between the parental haploid genomes will be assessed at genetic windows surrounding SNPs associated with a given trait, and compared with the genetic similarity observed for the rest of the genome. Furthermore, partial polygenic scores for each parental haploid genome will be compared and contrasted against the distribution of polygenic scores observed for the general population. Long term GAM, the one that occurred during several generations, will be investigated by looking at the genomes of ~40.000 individuals from the UK Biobank whose genome shows contributions from two or more highly differentiated genetic components which mixed in historical time. For these genomes, local ancestry techniques will be exploited to assess the extent of ancestry matching at the genomic windows of interest for a given trait, compared with the rest of the genome. The final stage of the ARGONAUT project will compare the extent of GAM detected in two European populations (from the UK and from Estonia) to the one retrieved from the Italian genomes publicly available from the literature. Given the relatively smaller sample sizes available from the Italian population, this last stage has to be intended as a preliminary exploration to set the basis for future sequencing and investigation campaigns that will be designed to better understand the role of social structure and mate choice in shaping the genetic landscape of the contemporary Italian population.