GIANT consortium

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GIANT: Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits

The Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits (GIANT) consortium is an international collaboration that seeks to identify genetic loci that modulate human body size and shape, including height and measures of obesity. The GIANT consortium is a collaboration between investigators from many different groups, institutions, countries, and studies, and the results represent their combined efforts. The primary approach has been meta-analysis of genome-wide association data and other large-scale genetic data sets. Anthropometric traits that have been studied by GIANT include body mass index (BMI), height, and traits related to waist circumference (such as waist-hip ratio adjusted for BMI, or WHRadjBMI). Thus far, the GIANT consortium has identified common genetic variants at hundreds of loci that are associated with anthropometric traits.


Data Release

We are releasing the summary data from our meta-analyses of GWAS data, in order to enable other researchers to examine particular variants or loci for their evidence of association with anthropometric traits. The files include p-values and direction of effect at over 2 million directly genotyped or imputed single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). To prevent the possibility of identification of individuals from these summary results, we are not releasing allele frequency data from our samples.

Click here to access the Summarized Genome-Wide Meta-analysis data files

Click here to create regional association plots from GIANT data using LocusZoom

Then select "Plot Using Published GWAS Results"


Selected Recent Publications

  • Pulit SL et al. (2019). Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for body fat distribution in 694,649 individuals of European ancestry. Nature 28, 166-174.
  • Ried JS et al. (2016). A principal component meta-analysis on multiple anthropometric traits identifies novel loci for body shape. Nature Commun 23, 13357.

Participating Cohorts and Research Groups

A growing list of collaborating cohorts and groups may be found here.