Published: Jan 12, 2026
Congratulations to Dr. Adam Lenhart for publishing his research on the effects of cosmopolitan inversions on quantitative genetic variation in Drosophila.
In this work, we find that cosmopolitan inversions have a major impact on trait variation in flies and that this impact is generally under-reported.
Large cosmopolitan inverions can also have a major impact on the GWA reults. Because inversions generate strong LD, they often have a strong effect on genetic relatedness matrices that are used as random effects in GWA. This impact on GRMs reduces power to detect association between variants that are linked (even partially) to inversions. Here, we show that the “standard” GWA approach in the DGRP - an approach that factors out the impact of the inversion in several ways - generates signals of association that are no different that random chance. Instead, using a “leave-one-chromosome-out” (LOCO) approach generates signals that exceed permutations across many traits suggesting that inversions and variants linked to them have an important impact on genetic variation.
Read more about this cool study here in PLOS Genetics