Organisms are complex systems comprising interacting characters underlain by shared functional, developmental and genetic processes. Within quantitative genetics (the study of inheritance at the phenotypic level), these relationships are summarized in the additive GENETIC VARIANCE–COVARIANCE MATRIX G (see Glossary). The usefulness of the quantitative genetic approach to long-term evolution depe...

The power of yeast genetics has now been extensively applied to phenotypic variation among strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. As a result, over 100 genes and numerous sequence variants have been identified, providing us with a general characterization of mutations underlying quantitative trait variation. Most quantitative trait alleles exert considerable phenotypic effects and alter conserved...

A deterministic two-loci model was developed to predict genetic response to marker-assisted selection (MAS) in one generation and in multiple generations. Formulas were derived to relate linkage disequilibrium in a population to the proportion of additive genetic variance used by MAS, and in turn to an extra improvement in genetic response over phenotypic selection. Predictions of the response ...

There used to be a broad split within the experimental genetics research community between those who did mechanistic research using homozygous laboratory strains and those who studied patterns of genetic variation in wild populations. The former benefited from the advantage of reproducible experiments, but faced difficulties of interpretation given possible genomic and evolutionary complexities...

Quantitative genetic approaches are often used to study evolutionary processes in ecotoxicology. This paper focuses on the evolution of resistance to environmental contaminants-an important evolutionary process in ecotoxicology. Three approaches are commonly employed to study the evolution of resistance: (1) Assessing whether a contaminant-exposed population has an increased resistance relative...

Genome-wide association studies in human populations have facilitated the creation of genomic profiles which combine the effects of many associated genetic variants to predict risk of disease. The area under the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve is a well established measure for determining the efficacy of tests in correctly classifying diseased and non-diseased individuals. We use q...

Genomic evaluation models can fit additive and dominant SNP effects. Under quantitative genetics theory, additive or "breeding" values of individuals are generated by substitution effects, which involve both "biological" additive and dominant effects of the markers. Dominance deviations include only a portion of the biological dominant effects of the markers. Additive variance includes variatio...