Language

English

Publication Date

8-1-2026

Journal

Nature Genetics

DOI

10.1038/s41588-026-02689-6

PMID

42477114

PMCID

PMC13411139

PubMedCentral® Posted Date

7-29-2026

PubMedCentral® Full Text Version

Author MSS

Abstract

Admixed populations comprise a large portion of the human population worldwide, but are often excluded from genome-wide association studies (GWASs) due to analytic challenges. Our group developed Tractor, a local-ancestry-informed GWAS tool designed for admixed samples that produces accurate ancestry-specific effect sizes and boosts the discovery power to identify ancestry-enriched loci. However, Tractor operates under an assumption of unrelated samples. Here, to address this gap, we propose Tractor-Mix, which allows for well-calibrated association studies in datasets containing admixed samples with relatedness. Extensive simulations show that this method is competitive with other state-of-the-art approaches that do not produce ancestry-specific results. Empirical testing of Tractor-Mix on admixed samples from the UK Biobank, Yale-Penn cohort and Mexico City Prospective Study highlight the value of this method, identifying ancestry-specific associations. In summary, Tractor-Mix extends the capabilities of current models and enables well-calibrated GWASs for related samples with admixture.

Keywords

Humans, Genome-Wide Association Study, Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide, Genetics, Population, Models, Genetic, Cohort Studies, UK Biobank, Computer Simulation

Published Open-Access

yes

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