Mark James Adams

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:

Edinburgh University had ‘outsized’ role in creating racist scientific theories, inquiry finds Investigation finds one of Britain’s oldest and most prestigious universities benefited from transatlantic slavery and was haven for white supremacist theories

www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Review of Race and History | The University of Edinburgh The academically-led review explores historic racial and colonial injustices, including enslavement, linked to the University as well as reassessing current policies and procedures.

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

Guidance discusses bias and inaccuracy, and potential harms to your own learning capacity, society, and the planet.

I like the idea that if you use generative AI, you need to include your prompts in an appendix.

Using generative AI in your studies: guidelines for students | Computing | Information Services • The University trusts you to act with integrity in your use of generative AI for your studies. • It does not ban the use of generative AI, though its use is restricted for assessment. • Some of your...

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...

"Whereas the Buildings in the University of Edinburgh are extremely mean and inconvenient, some of them in a very ruinous condition, and all of them unsuitable to the flourishing state of that Seminary of Learning…; and whereas a PLAN for building a NEW UNIVERSITY has been prepared by Robert Adam"

Cover of the book. Title and author name in white serif text on the green background with a small inset black & white photograph of Regent Terrace

Old College, University of Edinburgh, eastern part of the quadrangle with a dome.

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 We look for genes as a means to an end—biology, epidemiology, and etiology of complex human outcomes.

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.

[bazel] Bump rules_mojo for Apple GPU parsing · modular/modular@1afcc38 MODULAR_ORIG_COMMIT_REV_ID: 8a714e928f973c6c37f5bdf8eba99b8adee497eb

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?

Shared genetic architecture between eating disorders, mental health conditions, and cardiometabolic diseases: a comprehensive population-wide study across two countries - Nature Communications Here, the authors’ findings highlight genetic overlap between eating disorders, mental disorders, and cardiometabolic diseases, supporting the need for integrated treatment strategies across physical ...

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!

Principled measures and estimates of trait polygenicity The 'polygenicity' of traits is often invoked and sometimes quantified in quantitative, statistical, and human genetics. What do we mean by the polygenicity of a trait? We propose a principled definit...

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!

Epigenetic clocks and DNA methylation biomarkers of brain health and disease - Nature Reviews Neurology This Review considers how DNA methylation-based biomarkers can be used to monitor brain ageing and stratify neurological disease risk. The authors focus on epigenetic clocks, which can be applied acro...

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...

For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time | Quanta Magazine One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science.

Theoretical justification for buying more memory the next time you upgrade your computer?

www.quantamagazine.org/for-algorith...

Unmeasured Minds A guest post on the neglect of suffering and its clinical cost

"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...