Round-up: Biogeographic ancestry and SES

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

A biobank-scale test of marginal epistasis reveals genome-wide signals of polygenic interaction effects. Boyang Fu and colleagues examine the contribution of genetic interactions (epistasis) to variation in human complex traits. Analysing data on 300,000 British people, they detect 16 significant genetic interactions across 12 traits. These account for tiny fractions of the overall variance, though the effect sizes are larger than the GWAS effect sizes for the same variants.

What role for “generational wealth” in explaining racial wealth disparities? John Sabelhaus and Jeffrey Thompson re-examine the literature on intergenerational wealth transfers as a source of racial wealth disparities. Analysing more recent data on a wider range of assets, their findings are consistent with those of previous studies: intergenerational transfers can only account for a small part of the racial disparities.