FinnGen is a research project in genomics and personalized medicine. It is large public-private partnership that has collected and analysed genome and health data from 500,000 Finnish biobank donors to understand the genetic basis of diseases. FinnGen is now expanding into understanding the progression and biological mechanisms of diseases. FinnGen provides a world-class resource for further breakthroughs in disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment and a outlook into our genetic make-up.

FinnGen results are subjected to one year embargo and, after that, available to the larger scientific community via the Pheweb browser or through data download.

Please use the following description when referring to our project:

The FinnGen study is a large-scale genomics initiative that has analyzed over 500,000 Finnish biobank samples and correlated genetic variation with health data to understand disease mechanisms and predispositions. The project is a collaboration between research organisations and biobanks within Finland and international industry partners.

When using these results in publications, please remember to:

1. Acknowledge the FinnGen study. You can use the following text:

“We want to acknowledge the participants and investigators of the FinnGen study”

1. Cite our latest publication:

Kurki M.I., et al. FinnGen provides genetic insights from a well-phenotyped isolated population. Nature 2023 Jan;613(7944):508-518. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05473-8. Epub 2023 Jan 18.

Furthermore, if possible, include "FinnGen" as a keyword for your publication.

If you want to cite this website, use the following citation:

@online{finngen,
  author = {FinnGen},
  title = {{FinnGen} Documentation of R12 release},
  year = 2024,
  url = {https://finngen.gitbook.io/documentation/},
  urldate = {YYYY-MM-DD}
}

Timeline for releases:

[1] samples used for PheWAS.

• Arctic Biobank

• Auria Biobank

• Biobank Borealis of Northern Finland

• Biobank of Eastern Finland

• Central Finland Biobank

• Finnish Red Cross Blood Service Biobank

• Finnish Clinical Biobank Tampere

• Helsinki Biobank

• Terveystalo Biobank

• THL Biobank

To download FinnGen summary statistics you will need to fill the online form at . You will then receive an email containing the detailed instructions for downloading the data.

Release 12 contains

Using FinnGen data for publications

When using these results in publications, please remember to:

1) Acknowledge the FinnGen study. You can use the following text:

“We want to acknowledge the participants and investigators of the FinnGen study”

2) Cite our latest publication:

Kurki M.I., et al. . Nature 2023 Jan;613(7944):508-518. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05473-8. Epub 2023 Jan 18.

Furthermore, if possible, include "FinnGen" as a keyword for your publication.

If you want to cite this website, use the following citation:

Manifest

The manifest file with the link to all the downloadable summary stats is available at:

Chip genotype data processing and QC Samples were genotyped with Illumina (Illumina Inc., San Diego, CA, USA) and Affymetrix arrays (Thermo Fisher Scientific, Santa Clara, CA, USA).

Genotype calls were made with GenCall and zCall algorithms for Illumina and AxiomGT1 algorithm for Affymetrix data.

Chip genotyping data produced with previous chip platforms and reference genome builds were lifted over to build version 38 (GRCh38/hg38) following the protocol described here: dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.xbhfij6.

Quality control

In sample-wise quality control steps, individuals with ambiguous gender, high genotype missingness (>5%), excess heterozygosity (+-4SD) and non-Finnish ancestry were excluded. In variant-wise quality control steps, variants with high missingness (>2%), low HWE P-value (<1e-6) and low minor allele count (MAC<3) were excluded.

Pre-phasing

Before imputation, chip-genotyped samples were pre-phased with Eagle 2.3.5 using the default parameters, except the number of conditioning haplotypes, which was set to 20,000.

FinnGen individuals were genotyped with Illumina and Affymetrix chip arrays (Illumina Inc., San Diego, and Thermo Fisher Scientific, Santa Clara, CA, USA).

Chip genotype data were imputed using the population-specific SISu v4.2 imputation reference panel of 8,554 whole genomes.

Merged imputed genotype data is composed of 141 data sets that include samples from multiple cohorts.

• Total number of individuals: 520,210

• Total number of variants (merged set): 21,311,644

• Reference assembly: GRCh38/hg38

• Hail v0.2

• Cromwell-42

• Wdltool-0.14

• Plink 1.9 and 2.0

• BCFtools 1.7 and 1.9

• Eagle 2.3.5

• Beagle 4.1 (version 27Jan18.7e1)

• R 3.4.1 (packages: data.table 1.10.4, sm 2.2-5.4)

Summary association statistics

GWAS summary statistics (tab-delimited, bgzipped, genome build 38, tabix index files included) are named as {endpoint}.gz. For example, endpoint I9_CHD has I9_CHD.gz and I9_CHD.gz.tbi.

To learn more about the methods used, see section GWAS.

The {endpoint}.gz have the following structure:

Fine-mapping results

Two fine-mapping methods were used:

• SuSiE

• FINEMAP

Fine-mapping results are tab-delimited and bgzipped.

SuSiE results have the following filename pattern:

• {endpoint}.SUSIE.cred.bgz

• {endpoint}.SUSIE.cred_99.bgz

• {endpoint}.SUSIE.snp.bgz

FINEMAP results have the following filename pattern:

• {endpoint}.FINEMAP.config.bgz

• {endpoint}.FINEMAP.region.bgz

• {endpoint}.FINEMAP.snp.bgz

To learn more about the methods used, see section Fine-mapping.

{endpoint}.SUSIE.cred.bgz contain credible set summaries from SuSiE fine-mapping for all genome-wide significant regions. {endpoint}.SUSIE.cred_99.bgz contain the 99% credible set summaries while the default is 95%. They have the following structure:

{endpoint}.SUSIE.snp.bgz contain variant summaries with credible set information and have the following structure:

{endpoint}.FINEMAP.config.bgz contain summary fine-mapping variant configurations from FINEMAP method and have the following structure:

{endpoint}.FINEMAP.region.bgz contain summary statistics on number of independent signals in each region and have the following structure:

{endpoint}.FINEMAP.snp.bgz has summary statistics of variants and into what credible set they may belong to. Columns:

LD estimation

Linkage disequilibrium (LD) was estimated from SISu v4.2 for each chromosome. Use the tool LDstore (v1.1) for further usage of the bcor files.

ldstore --bcor FG_LD_chr1.bcor --incl-range 20000000-50000000 --table output_file_name.table

To learn more about the methods used, see section LD estimation.

Variant annotation

The variant annotation has measures (HWE, INFO, ...) listed per batch.

Registries

The disease endpoints were defined using nationwide registries:

We harmonized over the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) revisions 8, 9 and 10, cancer-specific ICD-O-3, (NOMESCO) procedure codes, Finnish-specific Social Insurance Institute (KELA) drug reimbursement codes and ATC-codes.

These registries spanning decades were electronically linked to the cohort baseline data using the unique national personal identification numbers assigned to all Finnish citizens and residents.

A full list of FinnGen endpoints is for release 12.

Excluded endpoints

The endpoints with fewer than 50 cases, and developmental “helper” endpoints were excluded from the final PheWas (“OMIT” tag in the endpoint definition file).

Risteys

(Risteys = intersection in Finnish) allows browsing of the FinnGen data at the phenotype level, including endpoint definitions, statistics about number of individuals, gender distribution, and longitudinal relationships. Please also note the R12 specific page

Genotype imputation was done with the population-specific .

The reference panel variant call set was produced with the GATK HaplotypeCaller algorithm by following GATK best practices for variant calling.

Genotype-, sample- and variant-wise QC was carried out iteratively by using the and the resulting high-quality WGS data for 8,554 individuals were phased with as described in the previous section.

Genotype imputation was carried out by using the population-specific SISu v4.2 imputation reference panel with (version 27Jan18.7e1) as described in the following protocol: .

Post-imputation quality control involved checking the expected conformity of the imputation INFO-value distribution, MAF differences between the target dataset and the imputation reference panel and checking chromosomal continuity of the imputed genotype calls.

We used regenie for the FinnGen R12 release. Regenie's main advantages are fast leave-one-chromosome-out relatedness calculation which avoids proximal contamination, and use of an approximate Firth test which gives more reliable effect size estimates for rare variants.

Regenie version 2.2.4 was used for the majority of endpoints. Regenie version 3.3 was used for endpoints that did not converge under regenie 2.2.4.

Links:

• regenie preprint

• regenie GitHub repository

• FinnGen regenie GitHub repository

• FinnGen regenie pipeline GitHub repository

We analyzed:

• ​2,502 endpoints

  • 2,499 binary endpoints

  • 3 quantitative endpoints (HEIGHT_IRN, WEIGHT_IRN, BMI_IRN)

• 500,348 samples

  • 282,064 females

  • 218,284 males

• 21,311,644 variants

We included the following covariates in the model: sex, age, 10 PCs, Finngen chip version 1 or 2 , and legacy genotyping batch.

The BCOR files were created using LDstore from the Finnish SISu panel v4.2.

The panel has been divided per chromosome. For example, to use the LD information in the first chromosome, FG_LD_chr1.bcor would be the file to use.

Settings used

• number of samples: 3775

• window size: 1500 kb

• accuracy: low

• number of threads: 96

• LD threshold to include correlations: 0.05

Example usage

LDstore v1.1 can be downloaded via:

wget http://www.christianbenner.com/ldstore_v1.1_x86_64.tgz

And an example to extract variant range 20 Mb - 50 Mb from chromosome 7 is as follows:

ldstore --bcor FG_LD_chr7.bcor --incl-range 20000000-50000000 --table output_file_name.table

Note

It is not preferred to use these LD estimate files for e.g. fine-mapping, since many of the fine-mapping methods (e.g. SuSiE) require in-sample LD information for good results!

SISu v4.2 consists of 8,554 WGS of Finnish individuals from 5 research cohorts from:

1. METSIM (PIs Markku Laakso and Mike Boehnke)

2. FINRISK (PI Pekka Jousilahti)

3. Corogene (PI Juha Sinisalo)

4. Biobank of Eastern Finland (PI Arto Mannermaa)

5. Finnish EUFAM Dyslipidemia Study (PIs Marja-Riitta Taskinen and Samuli Ripatti)

High-coverage (25x) WGS data used to develop the SISu v4.2 reference panel were generated at the McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University (PIs Ira Hall and Nathan Stitziel).

Variant Selection

Loss of function (LoF) variants were generated from vcf files with VEP (). LoF variants are defined as having consequences in the list [frameshift_variant,splice_donor_variant,stop_gained,splice_acceptor_variant]. Also, a max_maf (0.01) and minimum info score (0.8) filters are applied. This leaves 3,747 genes that can be used for the association tests.

Endpoint

We used all 2,473 passing core binary phenotypes in the analyses.

Null Models

We used as inputs the nulls already calculated for .

Association tests

Tests are performed with regenie --step2 in burden mode using a max mask (i.e. using the maximum number of ALT alleles across sites)

This is a description of the quality control procedures applied before running the GWAS.

PCA

The PCA for population structure has been run in the following way:

Variant filtering and LD pruning

The sisu version 4.2 imputation panel is pruned iteratively, until a target number of SNPs is reached:

9,641,808 starting variants: only variants with a minimum info score of 0.9 in all batches are kept.

The script starts with [500.0, 50.0, 0.9] params in plink (window,step,r2). It then decreases 0.05 in r2 iteratively pruning the imputation panel until the threshold of 200,000 snps is reached. Once the SNP count falls under 200,000 the closest pruning is returned.

If the higher r2 is closer, 200,000 snps are randomly selected, else the last pruned snps are returned.

Plink flags used: --snps-only --chr 1-22 --max-alleles 2 --maf 0.01 .

For this run 180,042 snps are returned.

PCA outlier detection

Then, FinnGen data was merged with the 1k genome project (1kgp) data, using the variants mentioned above. A round of PCA was performed and a bayesian algorithm was used to spot outliers. This process got rid of 15,898 FinnGen samples. The figure below shows the scatter plots for the first 3 PCs. Outliers, in green, are separated from the FinnGen red cluster.

While the method automatically detected as being outliers the 1kg samples with non European and southern European ancestries, it did not manage to exclude some samples with Western European origins. Since the signal from these samples would have been too small to allow a second round to be performed without detecting substructures of the Finnish population, another approach was used. The FinnGen samples that survived the first round were used to compute another PCA. The EUR and FIN 1kg samples were then projected onto the space generated by the first 3 PCs. Then, the centroid of each cluster was calculated and used to calculate the squared mahalanobis distance of each FinnGen sample to each of the centroids. Being the squared distance a sum of squared variables (with unitary variance, due to the mahalanobis distance), we could see it as a sum of 3 independent squared variables. This allowed us to map the squared distance into a probability (chi squared with 3 degrees of freedom). Therefore, for each cluster, a probability of being part of it was computed. Then, a threshold of 0.95 was used to exclude FinnGen samples whose relative chance of being part of the Finnish cluster was below the level. This method produced another 879 outliers. The figure below shows the first three principal components.

FIN 1kg samples are in purple, while EUR 1kgp samples are in Blue. Samples in green are FinnGen samples who are flagged as being non Finnish, while red ones are considered Finnish.

Kinship

Then all pairs of FinnGen samples up to second degree were returned. The figure below shows the distribution of kinship values.

Then, the previously defined “non Finnish” samples were excluded and 2 algorithms were used to return a unique subset of unrelated samples:

• one called greedy would continuously remove the highest degree node from the network of relations, until no more links are left in the network.

• one called native, based on a native implementation of python’s networkx package, performed on each subgraph of the network.

The largest independent set of either algorithm would be used to keep those sample, while flagging the others as “outliers” for the final PCA.

Then, the subset of outliers who also belong to the set of duplicates/twins was identified.

Final PCA

To compute the final step the Finngen samples were ultimately separated in three groups:

• 296,829 inliers: unrelated samples with Finnish ancestry.

• 203,908 outliers: non duplicate samples with Finnish ancestries, but who are also related to the inliers.

• 19,473 rejected samples: either of non Finnish ancestry or are twins/duplicates with relations to other samples.

Finally, the PCA for the inliers was calculated, and then outliers were projected on the same PC space, allowing to calculate covariates for a total of 500,737 samples.

Sample filtering based on phenotype data

Of the 500,737 non-duplicate population inlier samples from PCA, we excluded 355 samples from analysis because of missing minimum phenotype data, and 34 samples because of failing sex check with F thresholds of 0.4 and 0.7. A total of 500,348 samples were used for core analysis. There are 282,064 females and 218,284 males among these samples.

Further info

Bayesian outlier detection

Documentation from the original developers of the algorithm can be found here: .

Colocalizations in FinnGen

Our approach uses the probabilistic model for integrating GWAS and eQTL data presented in eCAVIAR (). Compared to eCAVIAR, we are using SuSiE () to fine-map our inputs and provide an additional colocalization metric (CLPA).

Our goal is to extract a list of genomic regions that show colocalization between two phenotypes p1 and p2. Further, we assume that the summary statistics of p1 and p2 have been fine-mapped. The fine-mapping output for each phenotype contains three columns: the variant identifier (VAR), posterior inclusion probability (PIP), and the credible set (CS) identifier.

CLPP

The Causal Posterior Probability (CLPP) is computed between two credible sets cs1 and cs2, with cs1 coming from a given phenotype p1 and cs2 coming from phenotype p2. CLPP is defined as follows: For vectors x and y, containing the PIP for variants in cs1 and cs2, respectively, CLPP is calculated by

This CLPP calculation is similar to equation 8 in Hormozdiari et al. 2016.

CLPP is dependent on the credible set size. By definition, any credible set size > 1 will yield a CLPP < 1.

CLPA

We derived another colocalization metric called causal posterior agreement (CLPA) that is independent of credible set size.

The picture below shows how colocalizations are defined.

Example Comparison

This rough example shows why we mostly use CLPA since it is independent of sample size.

Data

The colocalization is performed between FinnGen endpoints as well as between FinnGen endpoints and various QTL resources, as shown in the image below.

These resources are listed below:

FinnGen resources

The SuSiE finemapping results for the release were used as the FinnGen data.

Expression QTL datasets

• GTEx v8: SuSiE fine-mapping, 49 tissues, donors of mixed ancestry, Aguet et al. (2019, BioRxiv) (49 tissues only involve tissues with a sample size of n >= 50). Fine-mapping performed by Hilary Finucane, Jacob Ulirsch, Masahiro Kanai from the . Effect size interpretation: change in normalised gene expression (sd units) per alternate allele. Normalization = inverse normal transformation.

• EMBL-EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute) . eQTL data from 24 tissues/cell types, 16 RNAseq sources, 6 Microarray, SuSiE fine-mapping, donors of 88% European ancestry, Kerimov et al. (2020, BioRxiv). For RNAseq data, four quantification methods (gene expression, exon expression, transcript usage, txrevise event usage). Fine-mapping was performed by . Effect size interpretation: change in normalised gene expression (sd units) per alternate allele. Normalization = inverse normal transformation.

• (RNAseq), muscle and adipose tissue.

• : mega-analysis of immune cells from the microarray datasets.

Metabolon QTL datasets

• GeneRISK: 186 lipid species QTLs, SuSiE fine-mapping of Widen et al. (2020), 7632 Finnish samples. Effect size interpretation: change in standard deviation of the lipid species per alternate allele.

Biomarkers

• UK Biobank: 36 continuous endpoints, 57 biomarkers from UKBB prepared by , SuSiE fine-mapping. Effect size interpretation for quantitative traits: change in standard deviation of the normalized outcome per alternate allele. Effect size interpretation for binary traits increase in log(odds ratios) per alternate allele.

Post-colocalization QC

Only unique source1-source2-pheno1-pheno2-tissue2-quant2-locus_id1-locus_id2 combinations were included in the results. FinnGen endpoints with _COMORB-definition were left out of the results.

Acknowledgements

We thank the following people for helping us assembling the QTL resources:

• Kaur Alasoo and Nurlan Kerimov provided us the fine-mapped EMBL-EBI eQTL catalogue datasets.

• Hilary Finucane, Jacob Ulirsch, Masahiro Kanai gave us access to their fine-mapped GTEx data.

Endpoint

We included 2,502 endpoints in the analysis, which consisted of 2,499 binary endpoints and 3 quantitative endpoints (HEIGHT_IRN, WEIGHT_IRN, BMI_IRN). Endpoints with less than 50 cases among the 500,348 samples were excluded, as well as endpoints labeled with an OMIT tag in the endpoint definition file.

The quantitative endpoints HEIGHT and WEIGHT were acquired from minimum phenotype data. After that, phenotype BMI was formed from them, and all of them were inverse normal transformed.

13 endpoints did not progress past step1 in regenie pipeline due to convergence issues, and were discarded. The endpoints are:

20 more endpoints were discarded due to incorrect endpoint definitions. The endpoints are:

Null models

For regenie step 1 LOCO prediction computation for each endpoint, we used age, sex, 10 PCs, Finngen 1 or 2 chip or legacy genotyping batch as covariates. For sex-specific phenotypes, sample sex was left out from the covariates. We excluded covariates that had less than 10 cases.

For calculating genetic relatedness in regenie step 1, we included variants 1) imputed with an INFO score > 0.95 in all batches and 2) > 97 % non-missing genotypes and 3) MAF > 1 %. The remaining variants were LD pruned with a 1.5Mb window and r2 threshold of 0.2. This resulted in a set of 188,153 well-imputed not rare variants for relatedness calculation.

We used a genotype block size of 1,000 in regenie step 1.

Association tests

We ran association tests with regenie for each of the 2,489 endpoints for each variant with a minimum allele count of 5 among each phenotype’s cases and controls. We used the approximate Firth test for variants with an initial p-value of less than 0.01 and computed the standard error based on effect size and likelihood ratio test p-value (regenie options --firth --approx --pThresh 0.01 --firth-se).

PheWeb

The PheWeb portal can be used to browse results from FinnGen's predetermined endpoints (or 'phenotypes') a.k.a. core analysis results. FinnGen PheWeb tutorial is available .

These were analysed for genetic associations, which allows for disproportionate case-control numbers and corrects for relatedness between samples with a sparse genetic relatedness matrix.

The results from each association run are uploaded onto the PheWeb portal, which can be accessed by clicking this link:

Home Page

The figure below shows the a table of the first few endpoints ('phenotypes') in FinnGen with the highest numbers of GWAS significant loci, along with the summary of case-control analyses and the number of hits.

You can reorder the table by clicking on the appropriate header value (in the figure above, we clicked on GWAS significant loci to order the table based on the number of GWAS loci).

From home page in PheWeb, you can also go directly to coding variant browser by clicking the icon '' in the top right corner.

Endpoint Page

Upon clicking an endpoint ('phenotype'), you will then be directed to the endpoint's page which will contain information such as case-control numbers and results from the association scan of the endpoint. In the following screenshot, we show the endpoint results for “Type 2 diabetes, wide definition”.

On the endpoint page, you will find a similar Manhattan plot from the association scan which summarizes the association results for your endpoint.

Scrolling further, you will also be able to see the Manhattan plot in a tabular format, distinguished by either the traditional GWAS hits or based on a.

Variant Page

You can also browse based on a variant of your choice and see a PheWas plot:

The variant page shows the information on the gene that the variant is in, the most severe consequence annotation of the variant (from ), its allele frequency, whether the variant was imputed or not (INFO score), and links to external sites to obtain further information on the variant such as , the , and the

The Manhattan plot shown in the figure above also shows p-values from the association scans for FinnGen endpoints. Scrolling down, you will again be able to see the association scan results for the FinnGen endpoints in this variant in a tabular format.

To see the corresponding , you can click show lavaa plot on top of the manhattan plot.

All results (endpoint and variant-wise) can be downloaded in a tabular format by clicking Download table.

Gene Page

Gene pQTL and disease colocalizations

The gene page of the FinnGen PheWeb browser can be found from by specifying the gene symbol of interest. The bottom section of the page contains gene pQTL and disease colocalization data available for the FinnGen imputed SNPs. The main table contains gathered from finemapping results and combined across Olink and Somascan proteomics QTL platforms (FinnGen and UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project). The main table includes the following columns:

• source - pQTL platform source (i.e. FinnGen Olink, FinnGen Somascan, UKB-PPP)

• region - region for which the fine-mapping was run

• CS - running number for independent credible sets in a region

• variant - top variant associated with the credible set

• CS bayes factor (log10)

• CS min r2 - minimum R2 correlation between variants in the credible set

• beta - top variant effect size

• p-value - top variant p-value

• CS PIP - overall Posterior Inclusion Probability (PIP) of the variant

• consequence - most severe consequence of the variant

• gene most severe - gene corresponding to most severe consequence of the variant

The nested sub-table for a single gene pQTL contains a list of disease colocalizations between the FinnGen endpoints and the pQTL in question colocalizing with the lead variant of the pQTL (read more about ). The sub-table includes the following columns:

• phenotype - FinnGen endpoint (by clicking to the phenotype you will be navigated to the PheWeb region page corresponding to the phenotype in question)

• description - FinnGen endpoint description

• clpp - causal posterior probability calculated for a colocalization

• clpa - causal posterior agreement calculated for a colocalization

• len intersect - CS intersect

• len cs1 - FinnGen endpoint credible set size

• len cs2 - pQTL credible set size

All results can be downloaded in a tabular format by clicking Download table.

PheWeb for previous data releases

The PheWeb pages for previous data releases are available at

DF11:

DF10:

DF9:

DF8:

DF7:

DF6:

Note: PheWeb is continuously being developed, and some features available in newer DFs may not be available in PheWeb versions for earlier DFs.

HLA imputation

The HLA data was imputed from R12 genotype data, using HIBAG models created by Jarmo Ritari from the Finnish Blood Bank. More information can be found in the repository:

https://github.com/FRCBS/HLA-imputation

as well as in the publication:

Ritari J, Hyvä rinen K, Clancy J, FinnGen, Partanen J, Koskela S. Increasing accuracy of HLA imputation by a population-specific reference panel in a Finngen biobank cohort. NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics, Volume 2, Issue 2, June 2020, lqaa030, https://doi.org/10.1093/nargab/lqaa030

Variant summary

A snp-stats report was generated with qctool

Association testing

Association testing was performed using Regenie 2.2.4, or for some endpoints Regenie 3.3. Same settings were used as in the core GWAS analysis. See the Association tests page for more information.

Association summary

A summary was created from the regenie summary statistic outputs. This summary contains the most significant variant (by p-value) for each phenotype. Pheweb links to phenotype and gene pages have been added as additional columns.

Overview

GWAS summary statistics from matching phenotypes (assessed by ICD-10 code overlap) between other large-scale genotyping studies i.e., FinnGen-UKBB are meta-analyzed with a custom workflow using the inverse variance weighted method.

Heterogeneity between studies is assessed with Cochran's Q test and p-value is reported for each variant.

The meta-analysis summary statistics files contain, on top of the meta-analysis statistics and heterogeneity p-value, also leave-one-out meta-analysis statistics. The files are in .tsv (tab-separated values) format and compressed with bgzip and indexed with tabix.

Finemapping is not performed because the methods are not capable to handle heterogeneity between studies (e.g. different LD structure, different imputation qualities in variants).

Summary stat preprocessing

Prior to meta-analysis, sumstats are first filtered to remove any bad variants (e.g. missing or unrealistic beta/standard error/allele frequency).

Second, if needed, variants are lifted to genome build GRCh38 to match the FinnGen variants. Liftover is performed with Picard which, in addition to standard genome position liftover, checks that variants match the reference genome and flips alleles/strand if necessary. Variants that fail to liftover for any reason (e.g. variant doesn’t match reference, or no target for variant in new build) are discarded.

Third, variants are aligned with GnomAD reference and allele frequencies from the matching population are compared. Variants with allele frequency difference > 0.20 were discarded.

FinnGen-UKBB meta-analysis

Endpoints from pan-UKBB study were matched to FinnGen endpoints based on ICD-10 code overlap and meta-analysed together. Only perfectly matching endpoints were analysed. The European subset of the pan-UKBB study is used. For a subset of endpoints we have redefined the pan-UKBB endpoints to perfectly match the corresponding FinnGen endpoints. See the public data release folder for the readme and mapping files to find out which UKBB endpoints are custom defined. Mainly, already matching endpoints are analysed, but we are continuously creating and analysing custom endpoints from the UKBB to match our FinnGen endpoints.

Release 12 contains in total 867 meta-analyzed phenotypes:

• 854 binary endpoints

• 3 continuous endpoints (HEIGHT, WEIGHT, BMI)

• 10 progression/survival endpoints

Pheweb browser available at https://metaresults-ukbb.finngen.fi/

FinnGen-MVP-UKBB meta-analysis

Endpoints from the VA Million Veteran Program (MVP) were to matched to FinnGen based on ICD-10 code overlap and meta-analysed together. Contrary to UKBB phenotype matching, we considered also imperfect matching endpoints if the sample overlap - according to FinnGen - between the best matching endpoints was over 90%. Additionally, we evaluated the concordance of the effect sizes of the top hits between the studies to assess that the endpoints are a good match. For the matching FinnGen-MVP endpoint pairs we also included the corresponding UKBB endpoint in the meta-analysis if available. From MVP we included all summary statistics from the African, Admixed American, and European populations, if available.

Additionally for each individual study summary statistics, we filtered out variants with the imputation r2 < 0.6.

Release 12 contains in total 330 meta-analysed binary phenotypes.

Pheweb browser available at https://mvp-ukbb.finngen.fi/

We use two state-of-the-art methods, FINEMAP (Benner, C. et al., 2016; Benner, C. et al., 2018) and SuSiE (Wang, G. et al., 2020) to fine-map genome-wide significant loci in FinnGen endpoints.

Briefly, there are three main steps:

1. Preprocessing

For each genome-wide significant locus (default configuration: P < 5e-8), we define a fine-mapping region by taking a 3 Mb window around a lead variant (and merge regions if they overlap). If a merged window exceeds 10MB, we iteratively shrink the window by 10%, until the merged window fits into 10MB or is split into merged windows that each fit into 10MB. We preprocess an input GWAS summary statistics into separate files per region for the following steps.

Note: Due to the complexity of the HLA region and the difficulty in finemapping this region, by default we exclude the region 25Mb to 34Mb (hg38; inclusive) of chromosome 6 during the preprocessing step. Therefore, the HLA region is not finemapped as part of the standard FinnGen finemapping pipelines.

2. LD computation

We compute in-sample dosage LD using LDstore2 for each fine-mapping region.

3. Fine-mapping

With the inputs of summary statistics and in-sample LD from the steps 1-2, we conduct fine-mapping using FINEMAP and SuSiE with the maximum number of causal variants in a locus L = 10.

Integration to PheWeb

The "Credible Sets"-table on a phenotype page in the R12 PheWeb browser shows the SuSiE-fine-mapped credible sets of that phenotype. The variant shown per credible set is the maximum PIP (posterior inclusion probability) variant of that credible set. In addition to the causal variants, variants that were in sufficient LD (Pearson r^2 > 0.05), had a small enough p-value (pval < 0.01), and were close enough to the lead variant (distance to lead variant < 1.5 megabases) were clumped together with the credible set. Variants have been compared against GWAS Catalog and annotated. The LD grouping, annotation and GWAS Catalog comparison were done using the autoreporting pipeline.

The columns of the table are explained below:

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