Novel genetic associations with educational attainment

A worldwide consortium of researchers including academics from the University of Bristol has found that tiny differences across person's genetic sequences are associated with educational level. Philipp Koellinger from the Erasmus School of Economics explained: "The unique feature of our study is that we looked at a sample of unprecedented size in social science genetics research. Overall, we studied the genetic information of more than 125,000 people, looking specifically at a type of genetic variation called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)." Mothers from the University of Bristol's Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children ( ALSPAC ) played an important role in this work providing data on both genetic variation and educational attainment. Dr Nic Timpson from the MRC/University of Bristol Integrative Epidemiology Unit said: "We investigated whether common patterns of variation in our genomes are associated with the number of years of schooling and also whether or not a person had a college degree. The study identified a number of SNPs that are robustly associated with educational attainment. No individual SNP accounted for more than 0.02 per cent of the variation in years of schooling. Yet, the data suggested that all SNPs combined could eventually explain up to 20 per cent of variation if even larger samples would be available for analyses.