An updated map of GRCh38 linkage disequilibrium blocks based on European ancestry data

A map of approximately independent linkage disequilibrium (LD) blocks has many uses in statistical genetics. Current publicly available LD block maps are based on sparse recombination maps and are only available for GRCh37 (hg19) and prior genome assemblies. We generated LD blocks in GRCh38 for European (EUR) ancestry populations using a recent recombination map based on more than 115,000 individuals. This new map consists of 1,361 independent LD blocks across the 22 autosomal chromosomes and can be accessed at https://github.com/jmacdon/LDblocks_GRCh38