Genome wide association studies (GWAS) have largely succeeded family-based linkage studies in livestock and human populations as the preferred method to map loci for complex or quantitative traits. However, the type of results produced by the two analyses contrast sharply due to differences in linkage disequilibrium (LD) imposed by the design of studies. In this paper, we demonstrate that assoc...

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have successfully identified a number of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk. However, these susceptibility loci known today explain only a small fraction of the genetic risk. Gene-gene interaction (GxG) is considered to be one source of the missing heritability. To address this, we performed a genome-wide se...

Leaves are the plant's solar panel and food factory, and leaf traits are always key issues to investigate in plant research. Traditional methods for leaf trait measurement are time-consuming. In this work, an engineering prototype has been established for high-throughput leaf scoring (HLS) of a large number of Oryza sativa accessions. The mean absolute per cent of errors in traditional measurem...

Modern commercial tomato varieties are substantially less flavorful than heirloom varieties. To understand and ultimately correct this deficiency, we quantified flavor-associated chemicals in 398 modern, heirloom, and wild accessions. A subset of these accessions was evaluated in consumer panels, identifying the chemicals that made the most important contributions to flavor and consumer liking....

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have been used to great effect to identify genetic susceptibility loci for complex disease. A series of GWAS and meta-analyses have informed the discovery of over 100 loci for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In common with findings in other autoimmune diseases the lead signals for the majority of these loci do not map to known gene sequences. In order to reali...

A computationally simple genome-wide association study (GWAS) algorithm for estimating the main and epistatic effects of markers or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) is proposed. It is based on the intuitive assumption that changes of alleles corresponding to important SNPs in a pair of individuals lead to large difference of phenotype values of these individuals. The algorithm is based on...

BACKGROUND After the recent successes of genome-wide association studies (GWAS), one key challenge is to identify genetic variants that might have a significant joint effect on complex diseases but have failed to be identified individually due to weak to moderate marginal effect. One popular and effective approach is gene set based analysis, which investigates the joint effect of multiple funct...

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have become an important method for mapping the genetic loci underlying complex phenotypic traits in many species. A crucial issue when performing GWAS is to control for the underlying population structure because not doing so can lead to spurious associations. Population structure is a particularly important issue in nonhuman species since it is often dif...

Genome wide association studies are central to the evolution of personalized medicine. However, the propensity for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to fall outside of genes means that understanding how these polymorphisms alter cellular function requires an expanded view of human genetics. Integrating the study of genome structure (chromosome conformation capture) into its function opens ...

Supercentenarians (age 110+ years old) generally delay or escape age-related diseases and disability well beyond the age of 100 and this exceptional survival is likely to be influenced by a genetic predisposition that includes both common and rare genetic variants. In this report, we describe the complete genomic sequences of male and female supercentenarians, both age >114 years old. We show t...