Abstract
To identify specific genetic variants influencing the phenotype of entrepreneurship, we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) with 3,933 Caucasian females from the TwinsUK Adult Twin Registry. Following stringent genotype quality control, GWAF (genome-wide association analyses for family data) software was used to assess the association between each single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and entrepreneurship. The most promising genetic variant (rs10791283 of the OPCML gene on chromosome 11q25) was significant at the 6 × 10–7 level. Suggestive associations with entrepreneurship were also identified with variants of KIAA1199, SYT13 and PARD3B. Of the top 30 SNPs, 13 (43%) were located on chromosome 11, 7 (23%) on chromosome 14, and 5 (17%) on chromosome 15. However, the effect of each SNP was small, accounting for less than 1% of the variance. Our results suggest that the effects of individual common risk variants on entrepreneurship are probably very small and very large sample sizes are required to identify variants that reach genome-wide significance.