Christian Benner

Genomic analyses reveal new insights into Alzheimer's disease

This study identifies 118 new genetic loci associated with Alzheimer's disease across diverse ancestries and discovers 48 novel risk loci, including those enriched in neuronal cell types.

Refining fine-mapping: effect sizes and regional heritability

This paper improves fine-mapping by estimating effect sizes and regional heritability using FINEMAP, showing it captures more heritability than BOLT and provides better precision.

Genetic regulation of the human plasma proteome in 54,306 UK Biobank participants

The paper maps genetic associations with plasma proteins in 54,306 UK Biobank participants, identifying 10,248 new protein quantitative trait loci (pQTLs) and expanding the genetic architecture of the plasma proteome.

Population-scale analysis of common and rare genetic variation associated with hearing loss in adults

This study identifies 53 genetic loci associated with hearing loss, including 15 novel ones, using genome-wide and exome-sequencing data from multiple cohorts.

An Effector Index to Predict Causal Genes at GWAS Loci

The paper introduces the Effector Index, an algorithm to predict causal genes at GWAS loci using genomic features, achieving 85% AUC in type 2 diabetes validation.

Genome-wide analysis of 102,084 migraine cases identifies 123 risk loci and subtype-specific risk alleles

This GWAS identifies 123 migraine risk loci, including subtype-specific variants and novel targets, supporting neurovascular mechanisms in migraine.

Genome-wide association study of liver fat, iron, and extracellular fluid fraction in the UK Biobank

The paper conducts a genome-wide association study of liver fat, iron, and extracellular fluid fraction using UK Biobank MRI data, identifying novel genetic loci for these traits.

Insights from complex trait fine-mapping across diverse populations

Fine-mapping 148 complex traits in three biobanks with combined n = 811,261 yields 4,518 causal variant-trait pairs, 285 of them repeating in more than one population.

Computationally efficient whole genome regression for quantitative and binary traits

The paper introduces REGENIE, a fast whole genome regression method for quantitative and binary traits, showing computational efficiency and accuracy on UK Biobank data.

Functionally-informed fine-mapping and polygenic localization of complex trait heritability

This paper introduces PolyFun, a method that improves fine-mapping accuracy by integrating genome-wide functional data, leading to more causal variant identifications and polygenic localization of trait heritability.

An expanded analysis framework for multivariate GWAS connects inflammatory biomarkers to functional variants and disease

The paper introduces a multivariate GWAS framework that identifies functional variants and disease associations by transforming multivariate results into univariate phenotypes for follow-up analysis.

Interrogation of human hematopoiesis at single-cell and single-variant resolution

This study fine-maps genetic variants associated with blood cell traits and identifies cell types and causal mechanisms using single-cell chromatin accessibility data from the UK Biobank.

biMM: Efficient estimation of genetic variances andcovariances for cohorts with high-dimensional phenotype measurements

biMM efficiently estimates genetic variances and covariances for cohorts with high-dimensional phenotype measurements using a bivariate linear mixed model.

FINEMAP: Efficient variable selection using summary data from genome-wide association studies

FINEMAP efficiently identifies causal variants in genome-wide association studies using a shotgun stochastic search algorithm, achieving accurate results faster than existing methods.