Statistical associations between phenotypic traits often result from shared developmental processes and include both covariation between the trait values and more complex associations between higher moments of the joint distribution of traits. In this article, an analytical technique for calculating the covariance between traits is presented on the basis of (1). the distribution of underlying g...

Genetic drift and selection are ubiquitous evolutionary forces acting to shape genetic variation in populations. While their relative importance has been well studied in plants and animals, less is known about their relative importance in fungal pathogens. Because agro-ecosystems are more homogeneous environments than natural ecosystems, stabilizing selection may play a stronger role than genet...

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...

We propose a method to perform linkage genome scans for many correlated traits in the Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 (GAW15) data. The proposed method has two steps: first, we use a clustering method to find the tight clusters of the traits and use the first principal component (PC) of the traits in each cluster to represent the cluster; second, we perform a linkage scan for each cluster by using...

Consistent individual variation in animal behaviour is nearly ubiquitous and has important ecological and evolutionary implications. Additionally, suites of behavioural traits are often correlated, forming behavioural syndromes in both humans and other species. Such syndromes are often described by testing for variation in traits across