It is not clear why some people who are exposed to sars-cov-2 (the coronavirus) only develop mild symptoms while others go on to have life-threatening infections. Age and pre-existing medical problems are important, but it is likely that genetic factors also explain why some people are more susceptible to infection. One way to identify the most relevant genetic factors is to screen millions of points across the whole human genome and see which markers are more or less common in people with infection.

This type of analysis (called a genome-wide association study) needs very large studies to generate reliable results, and it is common to run the anlaysis in multiple different studies and then combine results. A global consortium has recently been set up to co-ordinate analysis of host genetic factors and coronavirus. This proposal plans to run genome-wide analysis in ALSPAC and share the results of this anlaysis which can then be combined with other studies globally. To do this it will be necessary to re-impute (re-process) the existing ALSPAC genetic data into an updated format so the results of analysis matches other studies.