Evidence for specificity of polygenic contributions to attainment in English, maths and science during adolescence

Georgina Donati,Oliver Pain,Emma L Meaburn,Kathryn Asbury,Iroise Dumontheil

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-82877-y

Abstract

How well one does at school is predictive of a wide range of important cognitive, socioeconomic, and health outcomes. The last few years have shown marked advancement in our understanding of the genetic contributions to, and correlations with, academic attainment. However, there exists a gap in our understanding of the specificity of genetic associations with performance in academic subjects during adolescence, a critical developmental period. To address this, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children was used to conduct genome-wide association studies of standardised national English (N = 5983), maths (N = 6017) and science (N = 6089) tests. High SNP-based heritabilities (h2SNP) for all subjects were found (41–53%). Further, h2SNP for maths and science remained after removing shared variance between subjects or IQ (N = 3197–5895). One genome-wide significant single nucleotide polymorphism (rs952964, p = 4.86 × 10–8) and four gene-level associations with science attainment (MEF2C, BRINP1, S100A1 and S100A13) were identified. Rs952964 remained significant after removing the variance shared between academic subjects. The findings highlight the benefits of using environmentally homogeneous samples for genetic analyses and indicate that finer-grained phenotyping will help build more specific biological models of variance in learning processes and abilities.

Highlights

How well one does at school is predictive of a wide range of important cognitive, socioeconomic, and health outcomes
Genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyping data is available for the ALSPAC sample and following
We performed a series of univariate genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of English, maths and science standardised national attainment scores, estimated SNP-based heritability and assessed shared genetic architecture with educational, cognitive, behavioural and psychiatric phenotypes

Summary

Introduction

How well one does at school is predictive of a wide range of important cognitive, socioeconomic, and health outcomes. Meaburn and Dumontheil demonstrated that a structural equation model that divides AA into separate academic subjects fits standardised national test score data better than a common AA model, and that there is cognitive specificity to attainment in different s ubjects[14] Consistent with these findings, bivariate twin estimates of English, maths and science attainment at ages 7–16 years suggest that just over half to two thirds of the heritability is shared between subjects after controlling for IQ [maths–English (0.54), science–English (0.64), science–maths (0.69)], leaving a considerable proportion of the heritability not shared across subjects and independent of general cognitive function[15]. In a study of 13,262 12-year-old twins, maths retained a heritability of 0.44 when controlling for both general intelligence and reading a bility[16]

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