Genetic correlation for alcohol consumption between Europeans and East Asians

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified many genetic variants associated with alcohol consumption in Europeans and East Asians, as well as other populations. However, the genetic homogeneity and heterogeneity between these populations have not been thoroughly investigated, despite evidence of varying effect sizes of variants between ethnicities and the presence of population-specific strong signals of selection on loci associated with alcohol consumption. In order to better understand the relationship between Europeans and East Asians in the genetic architecture of alcohol consumption, we compared their heritability and evaluated their genetic correlation using GWAS results from UK Biobank (UKB) and Biobank Japan (BBJ). We found that these two populations have low genetic correlation due to the large difference on chromosome 12. After excluding this chromosome, the genetic correlation was moderately high ( r_g = 0.544, p = 1.12e-4) and 44.31