Genomic Taxometric Analysis of Negative Emotionality and Major Depressive Disorder Highlights a Gradient of Genetic Differentiation across the Severity Spectrum.

A core question in both human genetics and medicine is whether clinical disorders represent extreme manifestations of continuous traits or categorically distinct entities with unique genetic etiologies. To address this question, we introduce data (GTACCC), a novel method for systematically evaluating continuity and differentiation of traits across the severity spectrum. GTACCC's key innovation lies in binarizing continuous data at multiple severity thresholds, enabling the estimation of genetic continuity and differentiation within the trait and in its relation to other traits via multivariate models.