- Traits influenced by many genes and many environmental effects

- Whole list of heritabilities for diff traits that occur in humans

- Very important point about quantitative genetics and heritability → largely in a big way also
characteristics of the population sample and the environment in which we have conducted
these analyses
- So a little bit misguided to say something like height has heritability of 0.88 in all human
populations because it largely depends on the sample in which you’re looking at as well as
environmental conditions that that population sample was analyzed in → so have to be careful
about heritability and not treat them as fixed values that are associated with traits
- We talked about how identical twins are separated at birth
- If environment did not matter at all to the expression of the trait you’d expect these
phenotypic values to all line up with a correlation of 1 → but environment does matter and
influences the expression of traits
- Tried to separate these twins out into separate foster homes → idea is that environments of
these foster homes are not correlated with one another
- There is correlation between the environments of these twins that are separated
- Couple of caveats when looking at genetics of quantitative traits → your heritability estimate
is for that population and that environment → difficult to take heritability estimate from one
population and one set of environments and apply it to another population and another set of
environments especially if sample size is small (often the case in twin studies)
- Coming from relatively small samples of twins under the assumption that the
environments are random
- Have group of cases which show the phenotype and a few thousand controls
- Go searching through genomes for SNPs that are occurring in higher frequency in the case
group (group showing phenotype) → gives info about potential genetic contribution
- Other approach that is quite similar → instead of using population, using crosses (does not
apply to humans but can apply to human models like mice, rats)
- This is plant model, inbred lines at top, can see one of leaves covered in hair and
other one is hairless
- Degree of hairiness on the leaf is a quantitative trait → varies in quantitative matter according
to normal distribution in a population
Here is what you do in QTL analysis:
- Cross inbred lines and create F1 (standard mendelian type approach)
- Intercross the F1s and look at the F2
- These represent 1 chromosome of the tobacco plant (can see parents have diff
coloured chromosomes to keep track of)
- Look at graph at bottom → is there some kind of gene that looks like its involved in the
hairless phenotype? Where would it be? → right at the top (blue portion)
- Answer: GWAS
- Think about that in terms of what happens during meiosis → you start off with a bunch of
inbred lines, chromosomes are more or less homogenous
- One generation of meiosis breaks that down into some sort of chimeric chromosome
segments but they’re big blocks
- Over many generations → lots and lots of recombination so chromosomes might look like
them instead of looking like these big blocks that are somewhat like the parents → they have
whole mishmash of chromosome segments that relate back to the parents but they’re much
smaller blocks
- So if you find an association between a gene and a trade → because they’re linked, the
likelihood is that they’re going to be much more tightly linked
- In the case of GWAS where you’re looking at the sum result of many many
generations of recombination vs a single generation of recombination in QTL analysis