Polygenic score accuracy in ancient samples: quantifying the effects of allelic turnover

Abstract

Polygenic scores link the genotypes of ancient individuals to their phenotypes, which are often unobservable, offering a tantalizing opportunity to reconstruct complex trait evolution. In practice, however, interpretation of ancient polygenic scores is subject to numerous assumptions. For one, the genome-wide association (GWA) studies from which polygenic scores are derived, can only estimate effect sizes for loci segregating in contemporary populations. Therefore, a GWA study may not correctly identify all loci relevant to trait variation in the ancient population. In addition, the frequencies of trait-associated loci may have changed in the intervening years. Here, we devise a theoretical framework to quantify the effect of this allelic turnover on the statistical properties of polygenic scores as functions of population genetic dynamics, trait architecture, power to detect significant loci, and the age of the ancient sample. We model the allele frequencies of loci underlying trait variation using the Wright-Fisher diffusion, and employ the spectral representation of its transition density to find analytical expressions for several error metrics, including the correlation between an ancient individuals polygenic score and true phenotype, referred to as polygenic score accuracy. Our theory also applies to a two-population scenario and demonstrates that allelic turnover alone may explain a substantial percentage of the reduced accuracy observed in cross-population predictions, akin to those performed in human genetics. Finally, we use simulations to explore the effects of recent directional selection, a bias-inducing process, on the statistics of interest. We find that even in the presence of bias, weak selection induces minimal deviations from our neutral expectations for the decay of polygenic score accuracy. By quantifying the limitations of polygenic scores in an explicit evolutionary context, our work lays the foundation for the development of more sophisticated statistical procedures to analyze both temporally and geographically resolved polygenic scores.