Population genetics of complex traits in sub-Saharan Africa

We studied the genetic heterogeneity of complex traits in countries within sub-Saharan Africa, spanning Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa. By developing and testing genetic risk scores across populations, we demonstrate their low replicability owing to population-level differences in the genomic variation and linkage patterns.

We designed a framework to characterize population-level heterogeneity in germline risk variants across east, west, and south African regions. Using population genetics approaches, we observe that these differences and continental variations in trait genetic architecture are driven by neutral evolutionary processes like genetic drift, founder effects, and recent mutations.

This work highlights the biological diversity underlying complex traits across ancestry groups and shows how distinct patterns of genomic variation correlate with genetic ancestry, influencing the relative importance of genomic loci in trait variation.