Back

Converging evidence of positive selection at height-associated loci in Europe

Hivert, V.; Wainschtein, P.; Robinson, M. R.; Irving-Pease, E. K.; Willerslev, E.; Goddard, M. E.; Barrie, W.; Sidorenko, J.; Visscher, P. M.; Yengo, L.

2026-01-28 genetics
10.64898/2026.01.27.702172 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The contribution of natural selection to height differences across Europe remains elusive. Prior evidence of selection on height based on genome-wide association study (GWAS) data has been challenged because of residual confounding in earlier GWAS results. Here, we reassess this evidence using complementary approaches integrating multi-ancestry and within-family GWAS data with allele frequency estimates from 13 European ancestry populations. We detect signatures of positive selection at height-associated loci within and across populations, which remain significant after accounting for ancient admixture events and is largely driven by allele frequency differences between the Netherlands and other European ancestry populations. Altogether, our results provide new and converging evidence of polygenic adaptation on height in Europe.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.