Traits can vary substantially in how they are affected by genetics and the environment. Some traits are driven by a small number of genes, while others seem to be affected by huge portions of the genome. For some traits, common variants explain most of the heritable variation, while others are skewed toward rare variants. Similarly, some traits, such as asthma, have a strong environmental component, while others seem more robustly expressed across environments. In this project we will aim to characterize these genetic and environmental architectures across many complex traits and seek to understand the biological mechanisms that cause traits to have similar or different architectures.
The overarching goals of this project are twofold: 1) to infer the genetic and environmental architectures across a wide range of complex traits and characterize how those genetic and environmental underpinning are similar or different across traits; and 2) to combine the genetic architectures inferred from goal 1 with additional data sources about genetic variants, environments, and phenotypes to learn why the genetic and environmental architectures differ across traits. That is, what can we learn about human biology from these architectures.