Individual kernel weight is an important trait for maize yield determination. We have identified genomic regions controlling this trait by using the B73xMo17 population; however, the effect of genetic background on control of this complex trait and its physiological components is not yet known. The objective of this study was to understand how genetic background affected our previous results. T...

Understanding genome to phenotype linkages has been greatly enabled by genomic sequencing. However, most genome analysis is typically confined to the nuclear genome. We conducted a metabolomic QTL analysis on a reciprocal RIL population structured to examine how variation in the organelle genomes affects phenotypic variation. This showed that the cytoplasmic variation had effects similar to, if...

In this study, one rice population of recombinant inbred lines (RILs) was used to determine the genetic characteristics of seed reserve utilization during the early (day 6), middle (day 10) and late (day 14) germination stages. The seedling dry weight (SDW) and weight of the mobilized seed reserve (WMSR) were increased, while the seed reserve utilization efficiency (SRUE) decreased, during the ...

R/qtlbim (www.qtlbim.org) provides a powerful suite of tools for model selection of the genetic architecture for traits influenced by multiple quantitative trait loci (QTL). The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling approach draws samples from the more probable genetic architectures. Subsequent visualization and summary provides posterior estimates of the number and location of QTL, their ma...

Although fitness landscapes are central to evolutionary theory, so far no biologically realistic examples for large-scale fitness landscapes have been described. Most currently available biological examples are restricted to very few loci or alleles and therefore do not capture the high dimensionality characteristic of real fitness landscapes. Here we analyze large-scale fitness landscapes that...

It is widely agreed that complex diseases are typically caused by the joint effects of multiple instead of a single genetic variation. These genetic variations may show stronger effects when considered together than when considered individually, a phenomenon known as epistasis or multilocus interaction. In this work, we explore the applicability of information interaction to discover pairwise e...

We measured the additive genetic variance within populations and the composite additive, dominance, and epistatic effects contributing to differentiation of photoperiodic response between two southern (ancestral) and each of four progressively more northern (derived) populations of the pitcher-plant mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii. Critical photoperiod and its additive genetic variance but not its h...

Transition from juvenile to adult vegetative phase in maize is associated with pest and disease resistance. However, reports are not consistent on the significance and relative importance of additive or dominance genetic effects and variances. The purpose of the present research was to elucidate the genetic effects and variances and to identify molecular markers associated with phase transition...