Welcome to my 2025 scientific publications wrapped! It's been a good year for behavioral genetics, with exciting studies on the relationship between our DNA and socio-economic outcomes, sexual behavior, personality, intelligence, and psychiatric disorders 🧬 See thread below 👇🏽

Thanks everyone who attended the 4th annual #GENEAmsterdam meeting - we had a great time! Keep an eye out for the website and socials - more details on the day will be posted soon 👀 ! For now, a large thanks to Adrià Túnez Aquilué, Tessa Zonneveld and Aysu Okbay for this years organization.

Scientists have characterized the broad genetic patterns that are shared across 14 psychiatric disorders. Could it reframe how mental-health conditions are diagnosed? go.nature.com/48AooC4

Here is another version of the Figure I made to summarize the study, showing both trait-level and factor-level genetic correlations

💯🙌

Want to echo Abdel and encourage reading this excellent commentary he put together!

For more context, see also the @nature.com News & Views article about this work, where I unpack what it means when genetic risk for psychiatric disorders overlaps with normal-range traits, including some positive associations with education-related outcomes: rdcu.be/eT4U7

1/4 Thrilled to be sharing new work published today in Nature describing the third wave of results from the PGC Cross-Disorder Group. This reflects a massive group effort to examine shared and unique genetic signal across >1 million cases for 14 psychiatric disorders. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One for the office and one for home

Behavioral, social and health scientists: if you’d like to combine social and genetic data, this is for you: shorturl.at/8gUcu. This course in London features all aspects from data collection to model estimation in our local cohort data - and the incredible @timtmorris.bsky.social as instructor.

With sequencing of Hitler's DNA making headlines, time for a reminder: analysing a polygenic score from a dead historically-significant figure won't give new insights into that person's behaviour. In a brief paper last year, we used Beethoven's genome to directly illustrate the fallacies involved.🧪👇

First time on Bsky and first big announcement! I am excited to announce that our new study explaining the missing heritability of many phenotypes using WGS data from ~347,000 UK Biobank participants has just been published in @Nature. Our manuscript is here: www.nature.com/articles/s41....

Late-life sexlessness is associated with higher education, lower alcohol and tobacco use, and a more nervous disposition, but around 15% of the variation is explained by thousands of genetic variants with tiny effects, research by @dr-appie.bsky.social et al finds: buff.ly/5YTYf48 /1

1/ 🚨New paper in Nature Genetics Genetic factors are associated with the educational fields people study, from arts to engineering. Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... FAQ: www.thehastingscenter.org/genomic-find...

My house, @dr-appie.bsky.social’s house, @dirksmit.bsky.social’s house and the BGA 2026 venue are in this shot.. if you go to the conference I’ll pull up in my own boat and we’ll do boatrides!!

Nice commentary by @fctropf.bsky.social reflecting on our study on not having sex: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (for full study, see quoted tweet below)

A study of over 500,000 Brits and Australians finds that people who never have sex are more educated, less likely to use alcohol and smoke, more nervous, lonelier, and unhappier. Regions with high income inequality had more sexless residents. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

🧬💥 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

#Sexlessness: Why do some people never have #sex, even later in life? A new study, conducted by @amsterdamumc.bsky.social and the University of Queensland alongside researchers of our Institute, explores this fascinating question. Check out the @pnas.org paper here: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2418257122

Within-family heritability estimates for behavioural and disease phenotypes from 500,000 sibling pairs of diverse ancestries https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.17.25336022v1

Apply to do a PhD with me, Laura Corbin, Gareth Hawkes and George Davey Smith ( @mendelrandom.bsky.social) in Bristol on identifying rare effects on health using new and innovative methods. Amazing team, great educational environment, lovely city. Forward to your undergrads wrapping up!

Loved hosting @essgn.bsky.social in Oxford including @dr-appie.bsky.social & family (& the rest of the ESSGN family as well) - read the post and links below to hear about this great event

We welcomed the next generation of @essgn.bsky.social social science genomics researchers in Oxford! ✨ Speakers from industry (deCODE, Genomics), data (UKBiobank), experts from Oxford & beyond + an Editor from Nature Human Behaviour! 📸 More here 👉 www.demography.ox.ac.uk/news/lcds-ho...

🔍 Behind the Paper: 'A Love Letter to Social Science Genetics'. 🧬 Some people call social science genetics a minefield. Others call it dangerous, even irresponsible. We call it the most promising field in life sciences. 🔗 bit.ly/46hwnBD @dr-appie.bsky.social @natureportfolio.nature.com #PsycSci

The largest study on late life virginity, based on >400k individuals, out now in @pnas.org Open access link: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Shoutout to shared first author @laurawesseldijk.bsky.social ❤️ Thread below 👇🏽

"Social science genetics encompasses the longest causal chain in science: from DNA to human culture."

A great read👇 Some social science genetics papers are among the most interesting and methodologically rigorous I've read. From biology to mating choices and inequalities, they deal with very fundamental concepts of what makes as humans.

A Love Letter to Social Science Genetics communities.springernature.com/posts/a-love...

"Part of maturing as a field is to recognize its history: to decide what to keep, & what we must outgrow, both in how we train the next generation of researchers & in how we help the public make sense of our past." @dr-appie.bsky.social's nuanced take on social science genetics, well worth a read.👇🧪

It was an absolute joy to create visuals for Abdel and to see how these keep supporting his stories. I also appreciate social science genetics in a totally new way now 💙

Thoughtful piece by Abdel on social science genetics - I am definitely taken by “one person’s confounder is another person’s signal”. Also humble about dark histories here and his own perspective

Like reading my own thoughts...Thanks Abdel!

Some people call it a minefield. Others call it dangerous, even irresponsible. I call it the most promising field in life sciences. My love letter to social science genetics: communities.springernature.com/posts/a-love...

Aboard the HMS Hardy-Wijnberg with @dr-appie.bsky.social and @margotvdweijer.bsky.social

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

✅ Published in @natureportfolio.nature.com today, the paper describing the initial whole-genome sequencing analysis of 500,000 UK Biobank participants. Read here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New pre-print online: Imputing parental genotypes through Mendelian Imputation: Ethical and Legal Considerations osf.io/preprints/ps...

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...

Link to walk-up songs picked by attendees from the Musicality Genomics Consortium in 2023. I won't release who's who. Only unlinked suspects @profsimonfisher.bsky.social @musiccognition.bsky.social @mehr.nz @dr-appie.bsky.social @laurawesseldijk.bsky.social ... open.spotify.com/playlist/7rU...

🔔 LGN Summer Lecture! Wed 16 Jul @ UCL Bloomsbury. @dr-appie.bsky.social (Amsterdam UMC) on “Genetic Architecture of a Social Construct”. ☕ 15:30 coffee | 16:00 talk | 🤝 17:00 networking. Members: check your email for the invite from the LGN mailing list.

Sasha writes about our new study (led by bluesky-less Nikolai Eftedal) where we show how simple genetic models don't adequately fit correlations between multiple types of relatives. The mismatch between observed and expected correlations are interesting, which are explained well in his blog post:

That’s all my scicomm talks for my trip done! Thank you for hosting me at Amsterdam @dr-appie.bsky.social

How does art contribute to science? My friend @eliza-coli.bsky.social and I 'talked' about this in a comic! I'm preparing some lectures for my trip to NL to talk about visual scicomm and this is such a nice excuse to look back at my body of work rather than just the current deadline.

I'm in London in a couple of weeks giving a special lecture for the London Genetics Network @ldngenenet.bsky.social The event is open to members of the London Genetics Network, who can sign up here: www.eventbrite.com/e/lgn-specia...

What's going on in psychiatric genetics? The @pgcgenetics.bsky.social have now published our latest progress review in @thelancetpsych.bsky.social, highlighting discovery, and laying out a map for moving forwards! www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

📣📣 Preprint just out from the awesome Xilin Jiang, Yujie Zhao & co! Pleiotropic heritability quantifies the shared genetic variance of common diseases www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... The overlap of disease aetiologies is surprisingly pervasive... ~50% of common disease heritability is pleiotropic!

Anyone have any feedback on this yet? New and hopefully improved version coming soon! 🎲🧬

Research by van den Berg et al improves the usefulness of the UK Biobank (450,000 individuals) in understanding the genetics of measures of intelligence, leading to the discovery of many more cognition-related genetic variants. 🧵 by coauthor @dr-appie.bsky.social: buff.ly/iaZDK4c

I'm so excited to see this online now in TRENDS IN GENETICS: Advancing GWAS of Human Communication. I review latest developments in genetics of speech and language and highlight opportunities for research on genetics and evolution of human communication. authors.elsevier.com/a/1lHgMcQbJF...