rs12201073 (RNU7-66P): Educational Attainment Variant

Key takeaways

• rs12201073 is one of 3,952 genetic variants genome-wide significantly associated with educational attainment in a study of approximately 3 million people.
• The locus spans RNU7-66P (a small nuclear RNA pseudogene) and RNA5SP208 (a 5S ribosomal RNA pseudogene); functional roles for these sequences in cognition are not established by the available study.
• All 3,952 associated variants together explain only 12-16% of variance in years of schooling; any single variant, including this one, contributes a very small fraction of that.
• No clinical annotations, drug interactions, or tissue-specific expression data are on file for this variant.
• Evidence derives from a single large-scale GWAS; variant-level effect sizes and replication data for rs12201073 are not separately reported in the available study text.

What the research says rs12201073 was identified as one of 3,952 approximately uncorrelated genome-wide-significant SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphisms, meaning single-letter changes at a specific position in the DNA sequence) in a GWAS (genome-wide association study, a method that scans millions of DNA positions across many individuals to find variants statistically linked to a trait) of educational attainment (EA, measured as years of schooling completed) in a combined sample of 3,037,499 individuals. A polygenic index (PGI, a score that aggregates the small estimated effects of many variants to predict a trait) built from all identified SNPs explains 12-16% of EA variance across validation samples, an approximately 20% improvement over the prior study in the same series. Direct genetic effects on EA and related phenotypes, meaning effects estimated after statistically controlling for parental genetics, account for roughly half the PGI's total observed association.

Reported associations

• Educational attainment (years of schooling completed): rs12201073 is one of 3,952 SNPs reaching genome-wide significance (p less than 5 x 10^-8) in a GWAS of 3,037,499 individuals; the full set of significant SNPs contributes to a PGI explaining 12-16% of EA variance. Variant-specific effect sizes are not reported for this SNP individually in the available study text.
• Disease risk prediction (secondary finding): The EA PGI built on variants including those at this locus adds predictive power for ten diseases examined in the study, beyond EA itself; disease-specific effect sizes at the variant level are not reported in the available text.

Evidence quality The association comes from a single study with a very large combined sample (N = 3,037,499), providing high statistical power to detect small genetic effects. The study identifies 3,952 genome-wide significant SNPs in aggregate but does not report variant-level beta coefficients, odds ratios, or minor allele frequencies for rs12201073 individually in the available text, so the precise magnitude of this variant's contribution cannot be stated. The PGI prediction accuracy increased from 11-13% to 12-16% of EA variance compared to the previous study in the series, reflecting improved estimation from the larger sample. Replication evidence specific to this SNP is not described in the available text, and no conflicting findings are reported. The dominance GWAS in the same study (N = 2,574,253) identified no genome-wide significant SNPs, suggesting that non-additive genetic effects on EA are negligible, though this does not speak specifically to rs12201073.

Lifestyle considerations No lifestyle considerations on file for this variant.