Estimation of heritability is fundamental in genetic studies. Recently, heritability estimation using linear mixed models (LMMs) has gained popularity because these estimates can be obtained from unrelated individuals collected in genome-wide association studies. Typically, heritability estimation under LMMs uses the restricted maximum likelihood (REML) approach. Existing methods for the constr...

The heritability of blood pressure estimated in previous studies may be confounded by the influence of potential blood pressure risk factors. We applied the classical twin design to estimate the contribution of these covariates to blood pressure heritability. The study consisted of 173 dizygotic and 251 monozygotic twin pairs aged 18-34 years, randomly selected from the East Flanders Prospectiv...

Twin studies have found that global brain volumes, including total intracranial volume (ICV), total gray matter, and total white matter volumes are highly heritable in adults and older children. Very little is known about genetic and environmental contributions to brain structure in very young children and whether these contributions change over the course of development. We performed structura...

Abstract: Heritability shows the degree of resemblance between relatives. Heritability is the most important genetic parameter on which different breeding strategy depends. The knowledge of heritability is a prerequisite for the formulation of breeding plans on scientific lines. There is need to know the heritability of different characters which are used for selection of parents for future bre...

Recent work has shown that much of the missing heritability of complex traits can be resolved by estimates of heritability explained by all genotyped SNPs. However, it is currently unknown how much heritability is missing due to poor tagging or additional causal variants at known GWAS loci. Here, we use variance components to quantify the heritability explained by all SNPs at known GWAS loci in...

Heritability estimates for corneal power were found to be high and similar for two populations which differed in their incidence of esotropia. This similarity suggest (1) that genetic differences for corneal power do not contribute to the difference in heritability for spherical refractive error reported for these populations and (2) that this character is not a critical variable contributing t...

Quantitative trait loci (QTLs) underlying multifactorial disorders explain little of the heritability - most is 'missing'. A new yeast study has identified QTLs which explain most heritability in traits. Why is heritability missing in human diseases but not here?

OBJECTIVES Pulse pressure (PP) is a measure of large artery stiffness and has been shown to be an important predictor of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. The aims of the present study were to investigate the heritability of PP in three studies, the Diabetes Heart Study (DHS), the Insulin Resistance Atherosclerosis Family Study (IRAS FS), and the NHLBI Family Heart Study (FHS), to estimat...

Since Tysk et al's pioneering analysis of the Swedish twin registry, twin and family studies continue to support a strong genetic basis of the inflammatory bowel diseases. The coefficient of heritability for siblings of inflammatory bowel disease probands is 25 to 42 for Crohn's disease and 4 to 15 for ulcerative colitis. Heritability estimates for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis from po...

This study investigated heritability for bovine growth estimated with genomewide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) information obtained from a DNA microarray chip. Three hundred sixty seven Korean cattle were genotyped with the Illumina BovineSNP50 BeadChip, and 39,112 SNPs of 364 animals filtered by quality assurance were analyzed to estimate heritability of body weights at 6, 9, 12, 15, 18...