Related papers: Finding the sources of missing heritability in a y…
Studies of the genetic loci that contribute to variation in gene expression frequently identify loci with broad effect on gene expression: expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) hotspots. We describe a set of exploratory graphical…
Presented here is a simple method for cross-validated genome-wide association studies (cvGWAS). Focusing on phenotype prediction, the method is able to reveal a significant amount of missing heritability by properly selecting a small number…
In the field of genetics, the concept of heritability refers to the proportion of variations of a biological trait or disease that can be explained by genetic factors. Quantifying the heritability of a disease is a fundamental challenge in…
Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…
GWAS in humans are revealing the genetic architecture of biomedical and anthropomorphic traits, i.e., the frequencies and effect sizes of variants that contribute to heritable variation in a trait. To interpret these findings, we need to…
Genetic studies of human traits have revolutionized our understanding of the variation between individuals, and opened the door for numerous breakthroughs in biology, medicine and other scientific fields. And yet, the ultimate promise of…
The study of common heritability, or co-heritability, among multiple traits has been widely established in quantitative and molecular genetics. However, in bacteria, genome-based estimation of heritability has only been considered very…
It is widely held that a substantial genetic component underlies Bipolar Disorder (BD) and other neuropsychiatric disease traits. Recent efforts have been aimed at understanding the genetic basis of disease susceptibility, with genome-wide…
Expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) mapping constitutes a challenging problem due to, among other reasons, the high-dimensional multivariate nature of gene-expression traits. Next to the expression heterogeneity produced by…
Motivation: Genome-wide association studies (GWASs), which assay more than a million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in thousands of individuals, have been widely used to identify genetic risk variants for complex diseases. However,…
Exploring the genetic basis of heritable traits remains one of the central challenges in biomedical research. In simple cases, single polymorphic loci explain a significant fraction of the phenotype variability. However, many traits of…
Methods to effectively detect multi-locus genetic association are becoming increasingly relevant in the genetic dissection of complex trait in humans. Current approaches typically consider a limited number of hypotheses, most of which are…
Many DNA sequence variants influence phenotypes by altering gene expression. Our understanding of these variants is limited by sample sizes of current studies and by measurements of mRNA rather than protein abundance. We developed a…
Background: Heritability is a central measure in genetics quantifying how much of the variability observed in a trait is attributable to genetic differences. Existing methods for estimating heritability are most often based on random-effect…
In the classic view introduced by R. A. Fisher, a quantitative trait is encoded by many loci with small, additive effects. Recent advances in QTL mapping have begun to elucidate the genetic architectures underlying vast numbers of…
How do genes affect cognitive ability or other human quantitative traits such as height or disease risk? Progress on this challenging question is likely to be significant in the near future. I begin with a brief review of psychometric…
Genetic diversity is central to the process of evolution. Both natural selection and random genetic drift are influenced by the level of genetic diversity of a population; selection acts on diversity while drift samples from it. At a given…
Heritability is a central parameter in quantitative genetics, both from an evolutionary and a breeding perspective. For plant traits heritability is traditionally estimated by comparing within and between genotype variability. This approach…
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have emerged as a rich source of genetic clues into disease biology, and they have revealed strong genetic correlations among many diseases and traits. Some of these genetic correlations may reflect…
In a mouse intercross with more than 500 animals and genome-wide gene expression data on six tissues, we identified a high proportion (18%) of sample mix-ups in the genotype data. Local expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL; genetic loci…