'Is artificial intelligence a scientific study?' 'Not really…' — Muriel Spark, Symposium, 1990

Brilliant paper by Visscher et al. Populations differ in traits/disease burden. Are these differences due to genetics? Comparing single variants or polygenic scores between populations is biased due to environmental confounders correlated with the variants. 1/3 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

At a symposium celebrating the 20th year of the @genscot.bsky.social cohort. David Porteous giving an overview of the origins of the cohort, answering the question "Why Scotland"

I'll be advertising a couple of PhD scholarships (breeding/wood quality, breeding/remote sensing) in the next couple of weeks, working with me and even cooler people at the School of Forestry, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. They cover uni fees + stipend for 3 years.

We're looking at setting up a trusted research environment (TRE) for our cohort, to enable observability and governance, smooth rollout of updates, limit proliferation of outdated copies. Need some pointers on how to provision these environments up so that they aren't exasperating to researchers.

Good evening from Scotland. Go Home Tae Yer Bed [Fhalbh Dhachaigh Don Leabaidh Agad] — Brògeal feat. Josie Duncan youtu.be/__ezRGsYsuo

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Excited to share our new preprint for the tskit_arg_visualizer Python package! ARGs can sometimes feel like a black box, so @yanwong.bsky.social and I have been developing a method to programmatically drawing these graphs. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2508.03958 1/6

Our study in @JAMAPsych ja.ma/4lVx1eu Using 🧬 we found that disruptions in #energy pathways link to specific #MDD symptoms (⬆️ appetite & sleep). This suggests a #depression profile linked to #metabolic risk, opening doors to targeted treatments. #metabolicpsychiatry

In Lilongwe for the kick-off meeting of the Genetics of Anxiety in Malawi project. Toward African-led, context-specific genomic research, supported by @wellcometrust.bsky.social Meeting at the Kwaza Arts centre.

"Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution" Our new article is out in @science.org today www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thanks! This is amazing! So the term 'Manhattan Plot' is not originally a GWAS term at all. Screenshotting the image here from a 1994 book on nuclear physics, for others who may be interested:

The University of Edinburgh has published its Race Review. The report goes way deeper than just ties to slavery: "…the UoE formed a central point in a network of knowledge about 'civilization' and 'race' from the period of the Enlightenment onward." www.ed.ac.uk/about/race-r...

In #GENETICS, Williams et al. present a novel statistics—haplotype score—for summarizing identity-by-descent (IBD) sharing that can distinguish half-sibling pairs from avuncular or grandparent-grandchildren pairs and assign individuals to ancestor vs descendant generation. buff.ly/SaZP3CA

My university has new guidance about generative AI. Requirements and restrictions are set on a course-by-course basis, but AI outputs must not be presented as a student's own work and the exact use must be acknowledged. information-services.ed.ac.uk/computing/co...

If you are new to GWAS, the lectures by Matti Pirinen are a good place to start. Conceptual foundations rather than how to use software. www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/mjxpiri...

Very happy to share our new paper now on @medrxivpreprint: “Genetic risk effects on psychiatric disorders act in sets”, a great effort led my PhD student @jolienrietkerk.bsky.social, and performed together with collaborators Andy Dahl, Jonathan Flint, Andrew Schork etc. Thread 1/n

🧬 New @emblebi.bsky.social service beta launched: Perturbation Catalogue 🔎 Browse genetic perturbation datasets 🧠 Train models 🧬 Interpret variant function 🧭 Explore gene dependencies Search, test APIs, suggest datasets, send feedback! 🔗 www.ebi.ac.uk/perturbation... Funded by @opentargets.org

This work is now officially published! Little has changed, but with added analysis to further support our original claim! bsky.app/profile/ajhg...

Reading about the plan for the "NEW UNIVERSITY" building in Edinburgh, built in the 1790s but now called "Old College". A. J. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh.

Come join us! We have an exciting PhD opportunity in statistical genetics at the University of Oxford. More info here: bit.ly/biomedDPhil 🗓️ App deadline: June 30th 2025. Please share!

Is there a quantitative genetics/evolutionary biology conference happening in Europe between Dec 2025 - April 2026?

I can now finally speak out loud my honest thoughts on missing heritability or the genomics/family gap in h2 estimates. Based on new paper the *issue* is a feature and not a bug. TLDR: SNP h2 only captures mutational variance and family h2 captures everything but mutation. 1/n

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...

Illuminating: "the proportion of genetic variance relative to the overall trait variance varies significantly across individuals. Therefore, we cannot obtain a single summary of the relative contribution of genetic and non-genetic factors for everyone in the sample, let alone in the population."

My talk from this year's probgen is finally out. Where do linear mixed models and random effects come from? They emerge from *mutations* on Ancestral Recombination Graphs.

Mojo (the new make-GPU-go-Brrr programming language) got a commit that lets the build system detect Apple Silicon 👀 github.com/modular/modu...

As we have learned, genes have dose-dependent effects on psychiatric traits. DOSAGE, it turns out, is a key element that helps unravel mechanisms of gene → pathway → cell type → brain region → diagnosis. Here we developed a framework to characterize cellular processes that mediate genetic effects.

LLMs are universal approximators: 𝜙₁, 𝜙₂, …, 𝜙ₙ → 𝑓 But what function 𝑓 are they approximating?

I almost forgot to say that our paper www.nature.com/articles/s41... has now been published 🥳 How amazing is it to work with medical records and genealogies of 17 million people from 🇩🇰 and 🇸🇪 to derive familial risk estimates, heritabilities, and 🧬 correlations of #anorexia, #bulimia and more!

Comparison of different ways of measuring trait polygenicity, and what properties a "measure of polygenicity" should have. Authors have a really useful section on how to interpret deviations between the measures for a specific trait www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The field of neuroscience views the goal of human genetics as "finding genes". This is an outdated view. In whole genome studies of rare variants, finding genes is the easy part. The more interesting and important goal is to map out the causal pathway from genes to brain function to cognitive traits

I'm giving a talk at an upcoming conference, and the organizers just requested my "walk-up song to be played as you take the stage." My modest proposal is that we make this a standard part of all academic conferences, like baseball players coming up to bat -- I want to see what y'all would pick!

New Publication: Epigenetic clocks and DNA methylation biomarkers of brain health and disease @uoe-igc.bsky.social @edinunilbc.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Theoretical justification for buying more memory the next time you upgrade your computer? www.quantamagazine.org/for-algorith...

"people already in an extreme neurological state should be seen as highly valuable. What was severe mental illness…if not an extreme phenomenon?" www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/unmeasured...

The author has a couple of events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival: www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival...

Here's my attempt to summarize the main result: no genetic model fits the data! When fit to biological relatives, the model is off for in-laws and twins (by a little). When fit with in-laws, it is off for twins (by a lot). And it is always off for adoptees.

📣New today! 📄Haplotype analysis reveals pleiotropic disease associations in the HLA region 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @jkpritch.bsky.social @finngen.bsky.social & colleagues

"Animal origins: Looping back in time" by Omar Matar & Ferdinand Marlétaz (@ferdix.bsky.social) This is a Spotlight on new work that helps answer the question, "how did the chromatin folding mechanisms controlling gene regulation emerge during animal evolution?" Check it out: rb.gy/k53o8p

SURF (where the @pgcgenetics.bsky.social datasets reside) will move some of its network from a commercial data centre to a cooperative one. www.surf.nl/nieuws/surf-...

Registration is open! 🗓️ Join us for a day of engaging discussions, networking and learning as we celebrate the 20th year of Generation Scotland. We are also offering the opportunity to join online Register today! www.eventbrite.com/e/generation...

New database for the synaptic proteome (comes with an API, too!) www.synaptopathydb.org Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I don’t think we can regulate our way out of LLMs in higher Ed. We need to develop healthy independent learning strategies that also work in the presence of LLMs, and strive to evoke real curiosity in students as it’s the most potent precursor to learning no matter the technological environment. 🔚

This about sums up what it feels like analysing biobank genomic datasets on a cloud platform. youtu.be/pfbzrrcQZjs

New unified bird taxonomy and global checklist. ebird.org/news/avilist...

From back in the day when a two page research paper with no tables or references could still be transformative?

At Edinburgh Futures Institute for the annual team meeting for the AMBER (Antidepressant Medications: Biology, Exposure & Response) project.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind. Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

Very pleased to see our paper describing the @ukbiobank.bsky.social second online mental health questionnaire has now been published in @plosone.org! This describes the origin of the resource as well as the data. Fantastic work by Katrina Davis in leading this 👏👏👏 dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...