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A genome-wide association study in ~3 million individuals identifies 3,952 independent variants associated with educational attainment. A polygenic index explains 12–16% of variance for this trait and contributes to risk prediction for ten diseases.

Gene discovery and polygenic predictions from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals.

Inbreeding depression has been observed in many different species, but in humans a systematic analysis has been difficult so far. Here, analysing more than 1.3 million individuals, the authors show that a genomic inbreeding coefficient (FROH) is associated with disadvantageous outcomes in 32 out of 100 traits tested.

Daniel Benjamin, Meike Bartels, Philipp Koellinger and colleagues report a genome-wide association meta-analysis of subjective well-being, depressive symptoms and neuroticism. The study leverages a large sample size together with genetic correlations between the phenotypes to identify, with high confidence, loci associated with each phenotype.

A genetic study identifies hundreds of loci associated with risk tolerance and risky behaviors, finds evidence of substantial shared genetic influences across these phenotypes, and implicates genes involved in neurotransmission.

Benjamin et al. construct polygenic indexes (DNA-based predictors) for 47 phenotypes and make them available to researchers in 11 datasets. They also present a theoretical framework and estimator to help interpret analyses using polygenic indexes.

Analyses of height and body mass index in 119,000 sibling pairs show that linkage and genome-wide association signals colocalize. Further analyses suggest that family-based linkage signals are fully consistent with a highly polygenic architecture.

Mathieson et al. carried out a genome-wide association study of reproductive success (number of children born) in humans, revealing the importance of diverse neuro-endocrine and behavioural factors.

AMBRA1-mediated degradation of cyclin D through CRL4–DDB1 regulates cell proliferation and prevents replication stress in neurodevelopment and cancer.

MTAG is a new method for joint analysis of summary statistics from genome-wide association studies of different traits. Applying MTAG to summary statistics for depressive symptoms, neuroticism and subjective well-being increased discovery of associated loci as compared to single-trait analyses.

A genome-wide association study in 293,723 individuals identifies 74 genetic variants associated with educational attainment, which, although only explaining a small proportion of the variation in educational attainment, highlights candidate genes and pathways for further study.

Within-sibship genome-wide association analyses using data from 178,076 siblings illustrate differences between population-based and within-sibship GWAS estimates for phenotypes influenced by demographic and indirect genetic effects.

Melinda Mills, Nicola Barban, Harold Snieder, Marcel den Hoed and colleagues perform a meta-analysis of data from over 300,000 individuals for age at first birth and number of children ever born. They identify 12 significant loci that associate with these traits, providing insights into the genetic basis of human reproductive behavior.

Genetic risk scores derived from GWAS of psychotic disorders are greater in creative professionals unaffected by psychosis. This association cannot be explained by shared environment or education. Thus, a shared genetic architecture underlies the propensity for creativity and psychosis.

Entanglement was observed in top–antitop quark events by the ATLAS experiment produced at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s  = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb⁻¹.

Intellectual disabilities and associated neurodevelopmental disorders may result from rare genetic mutations. Ganna et al. show that these also help explain variability in educational attainment, a proxy for cognitive function.

This genome-wide study of age at first sexual intercourse and first birth identifies 371 signals driven by reproductive biology, externalising behaviour and environmental effects, with later onset associated with lower incidence of some diseases.

Genomic structural equation modeling of genome-wide association data for educational attainment and cognitive test performance is used to estimate the genetic component of variation in educational attainment that is independent of cognitive ability. The study finds that noncognitive skills account for 57% of genetic variation in educational attainment.

snipar is a software package for imputing missing parental genotypes and estimating direct genetic effects. Application to UK Biobank data shows that effects estimated by standard genome-wide association study designs have confounding bias for some phenotypes.

We propose to change the default P-value threshold for statistical significance from 0.05 to 0.005 for claims of new discoveries.

A century after being predicted by theory, the authors detect and quantify the genomic signature of assortative mating in ~400,000 contemporary human genomes, and report new genetic evidence for assortative mating on height and educational attainment.

Danielle Posthuma and colleagues perform a large meta-analysis for intelligence and determine genetic overlap with several neuropsychiatric and metabolic traits. They find 15 new significant loci and implicate 40 new genes, most of which are predominantly expressed in the brain.

Matthew Robinson, Peter Visscher and colleagues use phenotypic data on 172,000 sibling pairs and phenotypic and SNP data on 150,832 unrelated individuals to estimate the heritability of body mass index across a range of experimental designs. They conclude that substantially larger sample sizes across ages and lifestyle factors will be required to understand the full genetic architecture of this trait.

Joseph Pickrell and colleagues analyze genome-wide association data for 42 human phenotypes or diseases and identify several hundred loci influencing multiple traits. They also find several traits with overlapping genetic architectures as well as pairs of traits showing evidence of a causal relationship.