BACKGROUND While its importance is well recognized, it remains challenging to test genetic association in the presence of gene-gene (or gene-environment) interactions. A major technical difficulty lies in the fact that a general model of gene-gene interactions calls for the use of often a large number of parameters, leading to possibly reduced statistical power. An emerging theme of some recent...

Simulation plays an essential role in the development of new computational and statistical methods for the genetic analysis of complex traits. Most simulations start with a statistical model using methods such as linear or logistic regression that specify the relationship between genotype and phenotype. This is appealing due to its simplicity and because these statistical methods are commonly u...

A simulation study was conducted to address the issue of how purely additive (simple) genetic architecture might impact on the efficacy of parametric and non-parametric genomic prediction methods. For this purpose, we simulated a trait with narrow sense heritability h2= 0.3, with only additive genetic effects for 300 loci in order to compare the predictive ability of 14 more practically used ge...

septoria tritici blotch is an important wheat disease in many areas of the world including iran's warm, humidregions. in this study, crosses were made between resistant breeding line bobwhite#1/fengkang andcommercial cultivars moghan3, koohdasht, tajan and morvarid, and derived f1, f2, bc1 and bc2 generations were used to determine the genetic control of necrosis, pycnidia traits and the area u...

Organisms face a constantly shifting landscape of environmental conditions and internal physiological states. How gene regulation and cellular functions are maintained across genetic and environmental variation is therefore a fundamental question in biology. Here, we analyze the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genetic interaction network to understand how the yeast cell maintains regulatory capacity a...

How does complexity evolve in artificial and natural systems? A central concept within genetic systems is epistasis, namely the modulation of the effects of a given gene by one or several other genes. Epistasis is known to have an impact on many features of organisms, from recombination and sex to the ruggedness of the underlying fitness landscapes. However, the multi-scale nature of evolution ...

Most important agronomic and quality traits of crops are quantitative in nature. The genetic variations in such traits are usually controlled by sets of genes called quantitative trait loci (QTLs), and the interactions between QTLs and the environment. It is crucial to understand the genetic architecture of complex traits to design efficient strategies for plant breeding. In the present study, ...