How do GWAS and rare variant burden tests rank gene signals? In new work @nature.com with @hakha.bsky.social, @jkpritch.bsky.social, and our wonderful coauthors we find that the key factors are what we call Specificity, Length, and Luck! 🧬🧪🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share our latest work on the factors that determine what genes we find (and don't find!) in GWAS and burden tests. We describe a critical concept that we call *specificity*. Led by Jeff Spence and Hakhamanesh Mostafavi:

It is now clear that more people are being diagnosed as autistic in their teens and as adults than in childhood. A prevailing theory is that those diagnosed later have "milder" form of autism, and later diagnosis entirely due to social factors.

🧬💥 Do the genetics that make you develop a disease also help you survive it? Not much. Our new study in Nature Genetics including 9 disease and 7 biobanks shows: • Susceptibility variants ≠ survival • PRSs for onset weak at predicting progression • Lifespan PRS predicts survival better

We are delighted to announce the launch of a new Master's Programme in Brain Health and Disease within the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge. Applications are now open! @camneurodept.bsky.social www.clinical-neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/education/ta...

We have an opening for a research assistant/associate to study the genetics of neurodevelopmental traits in the general population, and explore their overlap with neurodevelopmental diagnoses. Funds available until Jan 2027. lnkd.in/eHEcccwC Please circulate widely.

We are excited to share GPN-Star, a cost-effective, biologically grounded genomic language modeling framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks relevant to human genetics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/n)

Very nice method that exploits collider bias to identify independent contributors to outcomes.

Latest processing of UK Biobank brain imaging data - now with 82,000 usable first-scan datasets. Correlating brain IDPs with 13,000 non-imaging variables gives a rich manhattan-stye plot. 324,000 Bonferroni-significant associations.

Isn't genetics cool??? Within only 145 nucleotides(!) of a non-coding RNA (RNU4-2) - different variants in distinct regions / structures cause three distinct disorders!!! (all discovered within the last 18 months) 🤯🤓🧬❤️

Excited to share this preprint from first author Jon Rosen, a postdoctoral fellow in the @klmohlke.bsky.social lab and my lab. We examine eQTL study sample size and how this affects signal discovery and rates of colocalization with GWAS. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Interested in Network hubs, cortical hierarchies, and gradients? Ever wonder where they come from? Check our latest review, where we cover different approaches to mapping hubs, models for their evolution, and mechanisms for how they develop: osf.io/preprints/os...

ECR Workshop: Proteomics & Mental Health 🧠 9 Oct | Edinburgh | £25 Hosted by @mqmentalhealth.bsky.social & @datamind.bsky.social in partnership with MHP. Meet the Speakers! Programme & bios online – register: rebrand.ly/ecr-workshop

Science doesn’t need to be pretty and go according to plan; it just needs to lead to a discovery. If doesn’t have to be done alone or together with someone else; there just needs to be a discovery. It doesn’t need to happen fast or slow; just as long as there’s a discovery, then everybody is happy.

Our new paper is out today! 🎉 In it, we use administrative register data to document how psychiatric disorders are strongly linked to parental income, from childhood far into adulthood. Furthermore, we attempt to separate causation and selection using kinship-based models. doi.org/10.1111/jcpp...

Psychiatric Genetics Beyond Heritability: Q&A with Michel Nivard ( @michelnivard.bsky.social ) “We look for genes as a means to an end—biology, epidemiology, and etiology of complex human outcomes.” www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/psychiatri...

🚨New preprint is out! How do genetic effects on complex traits change with age? In this work, we compare different approaches to obtain age-varying genetic effects, and show how design and modeling choices can impact the conclusions we draw. shorturl.at/17snd A thread 🧵👇

New pre-print! ✨ Antecedents and outcomes of a late ADHD diagnosis in females: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... TLDR: This study finds evidence that a delay in ADHD diagnosis has profound and clear consequences by adolescence and this disproportionately disadvantages females (people who are AFAB).

New preprint!🚨 "“The Contribution of Common and Rare Genetic Variation to Emotional and Behavioural Symptoms in Childhood and Adolescence” is out on medRxiv. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread 👇

Studying the genetics of intelligence measures can help us understand the neurobiology of cognition and neurodevelopmental conditions 🧬🧠 We estimated missing intelligence test scores in @ukbiobank.bsky.social to reduce bias and boost power. Preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread 👇

I am proud to have led and contributes to the experts in evidence advisory group- alot of hard work went into this www.england.nhs.uk/2025/06/nhs-...

📢 Just posted: Our preprint introducing SPC — Spectral Components — is now live on medRxiv! Led by Dr. Ruhollah Shemirani and years in the making, this method offers a robust, scalable way to adjust for recent population structure in genomic analyses. 🔗 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/9

New preprint out! We mapped brain vulnerability in Alzheimer’s using MIND networks + population modelling. Put this together with a brilliant team @raibethlehem.bsky.social @sarahmorganuk.bsky.social and many more still making their way to Bluesky 🧠 doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.10.25328978

Excited about our new preprint: 1st successful genome-wide study of >61,000 panic attack and 29,000 panic disorder cases. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... We find 17 associations & evidence that peripheral neurons in eye, lungs and heart are involved in panic & other psychiatric disorders 1/n

🧵 THREAD: Preprint from @chrisrayner.bsky.social reveals how to fix selection bias in the Norwegian #MoBa study using population-wide registry data! For the first time, we can quantify and adjust for selection bias in this major epidemiological resource. Spread the good news! osf.io/preprints/os...

1/13 New preprint out! We developed methods to test a key assumption in family-based genetic studies: that siblings don’t genetically influence each other’s traits. Spoiler: mostly they don’t, but there’s a twist with ADHD ratings at age 3 👶 osf.io/preprints/ps...

📣 Latest from the lab: Performance of deep-learning-based approaches to improve polygenic scores www.nature.com/articles/s41... Its thought deep learning will substantially improve PGS but the reality is MANY have tried but no/little gain has been seen so far. Here we report our negative results.

(1/9) 📣 OUT NOW! 📣 So excited to share that our systematic review and meta-analysis on the autism polygenic score is now published in JAACAP Open @jaacapjournals.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ja... A (long) thread of our main findings ⤵️

Extremely excited to share the first effort of the Revived Genomics of Personality Consortium: A highly-powered, comprehensive GWAS of the Big Five personality traits in 1.14 million participants from 46 cohorts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Today in @nature.com , we report a spatial single-cell atlas of human cortical development, revealing surprisingly early specification of human cortical layers and areas. We built an interactive browser to explore the spatial data: walshlab.org/research/cor... Paper link below 👇

🧵5 Top Free Alternatives to BioRender for Scientific Illustrations! These five websites offer free scientific illustrations for biologists. Great for presentations, research papers and other research communication needs. Save and share the post!

New review on the genetics of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Check out our new OCD GWAS (53,660 cases and 2,044,417 controls) in @natgenet.nature.com 🧬🧠 Genetic risk was associated with excitatory neurons in the cortex and hippocampus. There was much genetic overlap with anxiety, depression, and anorexia. Open access: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our gene discovery project on age at onset of walking is out today! Find the paper here www.nature.com/articles/s41... Huge thanks to the cohorts, collaborators & coauthors, in particular first author Dr Anna Gui 1/n

Delighted to share our new preprint, the outcome of many years of collaborative work with Giuseppe Testa’s group, both at the bench & in front of the computer, probing human brain evolution using organoids. We tried something cool, and learned a lot 🧪🧫🧠🧬 [follow 🧵] www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am recruiting a quantitative/computational postdoc to my group at UCLA. This is a great opportunity to work on foundational theory, methods, and software in statistical genetics. Link to apply: recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10275. Please repost!

Pleased to share new work from our group, led by PhD student Edward He. Edward joined the group as a summer student interested in the genetics of resting state functional connectivity, measured using graph networks. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is a *key* new paper in the world of school mental health interventions A very large trial (N=6388) testing a universal CBT-based app for adolescent depression (13-14y) No effects found (on depression, anxiety, distress or insomnia) (🧵) mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/28/1...

Pleased to share our recent work led by Raphael Bourque where we ask if it's possible to predict co-occurring intellectual disability among autistic individuals using genetic and developmental data. Early identification of these children may be useful for targeted support. bit.ly/4jFY5Nh

🚨I could not be more excited to share our new preprint on saturation genome editing of the small nuclear RNA (snRNA) RNU4-2: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... A super fun collaboration with incredible duo @gregfindlay.bsky.social @joachimdejonghe.bsky.social from @crick.ac.uk 🧬🖥️🩺 🧵1/12

In every civilization, people end up sorted into levels of socio-economic status (SES). We explore the history, present, and future of scientific research on the complicated relationship between SES and DNA in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social💰🧬🎓 Link: rdcu.be/efacK Thread below 👇🏽

Early #Psychosis Mental Health Mission clinical research fellow posts in Manchester. NHS experience required. ideal for post-F2 doctors considering psychiatry and junior NHS psychiatry residents www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMA485/c... @gkmurray.bsky.social @drkkendall.bsky.social

Bullying is our most tractable public mental health threat - there is lots we can do to reduce its prevalence & impact

Can we use brain scans to identify biologically distinct "autisms"? And If so, how? In our latest cross-species study 🐭👨 with @iitalk.bsky.social we dive into these questions! Find out more here 👇👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread below 🧵 1/n

Wonderful collaboration with @sofievalk.bsky.social and colleagues on this work investigating the genetic correlates of functional gradients of the human cortex. Led by @wanb.bsky.social.

Important new evidence published today: large-scale DofE trial (N=12,166) found that two universal MH awareness interventions, in secondary schools, led to an *increase* in emotional symptoms at long term (9-12 month) follow up tinyurl.com/4ffday8y Thread below /1

Excited to finally share that our paper looking at the effect of rare non-coding variants using WGS on circulating protein levels in the UKB has been released in Nature Genetics @naturegenet.bsky.social! We now analyse the full 3,000 circulating proteins in all 50,000 individuals rdcu.be/ea16i

Pleased to share new work from our group, led by the talented Yuanjun (Genie) Gu, who is not on Bluesy. www.nature.com/articles/s41... We ask if there is *any* shared genetics between autism and some selected structural MRI phenotypes.

An exciting opportunity to work an important problem using cutting edge methods with fantastic people.