Mats Nagel

Short CV

Research

Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have boosted the gene-finding enterprise, and made important contributions to medicine and pharmaceutics. However, for psychiatric traits results are still limited. First, for some traits only few genetic variants have been identified. Second, even when the number of associated variants is substantial, these typically explain only a small portion of the phenotypic variance. Third, underlying biological mechanisms have to not been uncovered.

The focus of my work is twofold; on the one hand I aim to reduce the complexity of the traits by studying the genetics of symptoms rather than the overarching trait. On the other hand, I aim to investigate the overlap between different traits. Both approaches have the potential to improve our biological understanding, by improving specificity of the genetic signal.

Highlighted publications

• Nagel M, Jansen PR, Stringer S, Watanabe K, de Leeuw CA, Bryois J, Savage JE, Hammerschlag AR, Skene N, Muñoz-Manchado AB, the 23andMe Research Team, White TJH, Tiemeier H, Linnarsson S, Hjerling-Leffler J, Polderman TJC, Sullivan PF, van der Sluis S, Posthuma D. Meta-Analysis of Genome-wide Association Studies for Neuroticism in 449,484 Individuals Identifies Novel Genetic Loci and Pathways. Nature Genetics, July 2018, DOI: 10.1038/s41588-018-0151-7

• Nagel M, Watanabe K, Stringer S, Posthuma D, van der Sluis S. Item-level analyses reveal genetic heterogeneity in neuroticism. Nature Communications, March 2018, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03242-8