BACKGROUND Self-reported depressive symptoms among the elderly have generated considerable interest because they are readily available measures of overall well-being in a population often thought to be at special risk for mental disorder. METHOD The heritability of depression symptoms was investigated in a sample of 2169 pairs of Danish twins (1033 MZ and 1136 same sex DZ) ranging in age from...

Impaired stress-induced pressure natriuresis, ie, an inadequate compensatory increase in urinary sodium excretion (UNaV) in response to a stress-induced blood pressure increase, may lead to the premature development of essential hypertension. To assess the heritability of baseline UNaV, stress UNaV, and the UNaV response to stress ( UNaV stress UNaV baseline UNaV), we studied 396 black and 494 ...

Breeding programs in oriental river prawn populations would benefit from a knowledge of heritabilities for growth-related traits to assess their potential genetic improvement. This study reports the results heritability estimation and evaluation epistatic interactions (Macrobrachium nipponense). The showed that estimates (h2) were low medium magnitude, ranging between 0.10 (±0.02) 0.22 (±0.01) ...

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are an optimal design for discovery of disease risk loci for diseases whose underlying genetic architecture includes many common causal loci of small effect (a polygenic architecture). We consider two designs that deserve careful consideration if the true underlying genetic architecture of the trait is polygenic: parent-offspring trios and unscreened cont...

Several studies have been conducted to assess the influence of genetic variation on genome-wide gene expression profiles measured by the microarray technologies. Due to substantial noise in microarray-based experiments, it has long been recognized that proper normalization is a crucial step to ensure sensitive and reliable downstream analyses. This is especially true when large number of sample...

In family studies with multiple continuous phenotypes, heritability can be conveniently evaluated through the so-called principal-component of heredity (PCH, for short; Ott and Rabinowitz in Hum Hered 49:106–111, 1999). Estimation of the PCH, however, is notoriously difficult when entertaining a large collection of phenotypes which naturally arises in dealing with modern genomic data such as th...

BACKGROUND To date, the only estimate of the heritability of telomere length in wild populations comes from humans. Thus, there is a need for analysis of natural populations with respect to how telomeres evolve. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Here, we show that telomere length is heritable in free-ranging sand lizards, Lacerta agilis. More importantly, heritability estimates analysed within, ...

Abstract This study employs multiple regression models based on DeFries and Fulker (1985), and a large sample of twins, to assess heritability in attitudes towards economic risk, and the extent to which this heritability differs between males and females. Consistent with Cesarini et al. (2009), it is found that attitudes towards risk are moderately heritable, with about 20 percent of the variat...

Identifying genetic variation underlying a complex disease is important. Many complex diseases have heterogeneous phenotypes and are products of a variety of genetic and environmental factors acting in concert. Deriving highly heritable quantitative traits of a complex disease can improve the identification of genetic risk of the disease. The most sophisticated methods so far perform unsupervis...

The present experiment was conducted with 16 germplasms and two varieties of snake gourd. yield contributing traits such as node order first male flower, female days to flowering, internodal length, harvest, single fruit weight, girth, number fruits per plant, were studied assess the genetic variability, heritability advance besides correlation path coefficient analysis. study GCV PCV in gourd ...