Getting the Most Out of Your Genome-Wide Association Study Using Polygenic Risk Scores

Determining the risk of a phenotypic outcome is a complex balance of variants for or against the phenotype, which in the context of human genetic diseases have been summarized using polygenic risk scores. In a previously published article (K. T. Hellmann, L. Challagundla, B. M. Gray, D. A. Robinson, J Clin Microbiol 61:e01412-22, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1128/jcm.01412-22), Hellmann and colleagues demonstrate how the use of a bacterial polygenic risk score to predict S. epidermidis infection versus coloniza-tion in neonates led to both increases in predictive accuracy and improved generalizability to external data.

Automated summary

According to the study by K. T. Hellmann et al., the use of a bacterial polygenic risk score improves the prediction accuracy of S. epidermidis infection in neonates and enhances the generalizability to external data.