Quantitative trait loci (QTL) affecting milk production and health of dairy cattle were mapped in a very large Holstein granddaughter design. The analysis included 1794 sons of 14 sires and 206 genetic markers distributed across all 29 autosomes and flanking an estimated 2497 autosomal cM using Kosambi's mapping function. All families were analyzed jointly with least-squares (LS) and variance c...

A doubled haploid population of 123 lines from IR64/Azucena was used to dissect the developmental behavior and genotype by environment interaction for plant height by conditional and unconditional quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping methods in rice. It was shown that the number of QTL detected was different at various measuring stages. Some QTL could be detected at all stages and some only at...

Male mating behavior is an important component of fitness in Drosophila and displays segregating variation in natural populations. However, we know very little about the genes affecting naturally occurring variation in mating behavior, their effects, or their interactions. Here, we have mapped quantitative trait loci (QTL) affecting courtship occurrence, courtship latency, copulation occurrence...

The joint action of multiple genes is an important source of variation for complex traits and human diseases. However, mapping genes with epistatic effects and gene-environment interactions is a difficult problem because of relatively small sample sizes and very large parameter spaces for quantitative trait locus models that include such interactions. Here we present a nonparametric Bayesian me...

Sporulation efficiency in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a well-established model for studying quantitative traits. A variety of genes and nucleotides causing different sporulation efficiencies in laboratory, as well as in wild strains, has already been extensively characterised (mainly by reciprocal hemizygosity analysis and nucleotide exchange methods). We applied a different strategy ...

An approach to increase the efficiency of mapping quantitative trait loci (QTL) was proposed earlier by the authors on the basis of bivariate analysis of correlated traits. The power of QTL detection using the log-likelihood ratio (LOD scores) grows proportionally to the broad sense heritability. We found that this relationship holds also for correlated traits, so that an increased bivariate he...

The mapping of loci underlying variation in quantitative traits is proving to be a powerful tool in genetic studies of animals and other organisms. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in crosses between genetically diverse lines has shown the presence of many QTL, as similarly have studies within livestock populations. Although much remains to be done with this type of analysis, higher resol...

The Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) mapping problem aims to identify regions in the genome that are linked to phenotypic features of the developed organism that vary in degree. It is a principle step in determining targets for further genetic analysis and is key in decoding the role of specific genes that control quantitative traits within species. Applications include identifying genetic causes ...

The Virginia chicken lines have been divergently selected for juvenile body weight for more than 50 generations. Today, the high- and low-weight lines show a >12-fold difference for the selected trait, 56-d body weight. These lines provide unique opportunities to study the genetic architecture of long-term, single-trait selection. Previously, several quantitative trait loci (QTL) contributing t...

The ability of a single genotype to generate different phenotypes in disparate environments is termed phenotypic plasticity, which reflects the interaction of genotype and environment on developmental processes. However, there is controversy over the definition of plasticity genes. The gene regulation model states that plasticity loci influence trait changes between environments without alterin...