Pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.) is an important cereal in semi-arid tropics in Africa and India. Conventionally, millet has good amounts of grain minerals compared to other cereals. Estimation of genetic parameters would be useful in developing appropriate breeding and selection strategies. The present study was conducted to evaluate the local pearl millet accessions to assess the...

Impaired stress-induced pressure natriuresis, ie, an inadequate compensatory increase in urinary sodium excretion (U(Na)V) in response to a stress-induced blood pressure increase, may lead to the premature development of essential hypertension. To assess the heritability of baseline U(Na)V, stress U(Na)V, and the U(Na)V response to stress (Delta U(Na)V=stress U(Na)V- baseline U(Na)V), we studie...

Phenotypic heterogeneity of depression has been cited as one of the causes of the limited success to detect genetic variants in genome-wide studies. The 7-item Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS-D) was developed to detect depression in individuals with physical health problems. An initial psychometric analysis showed that a short version ("HADS-4") is less heterogeneous and hence more ...

Human genetics has been haunted by the mystery of "missing heritability" of common traits. Although studies have discovered >1,200 variants associated with common diseases and traits, these variants typically appear to explain only a minority of the heritability. The proportion of heritability explained by a set of variants is the ratio of (i) the heritability due to these variants (numerator),...

Heritability is a population parameter of importance in evolution, plant and animal breeding, and human medical genetics. It can be estimated using pedigree designs and, more recently, using relationships estimated from markers. We derive the sampling variance of the estimate of heritability for a wide range of experimental designs, assuming that estimation is by maximum likelihood and that the...

Multivariate phenotypes may be characterized collectively by a variety of low level traits, such as in the diagnosis of a disease that relies on multiple disease indicators. Such multivariate phenotypes are often used in genetic association studies. If highly heritable components of a multivariate phenotype can be identified, it can maximize the likelihood of finding genetic associations. Exist...

The rhesus macaque is an important model for human atherosclerosis but genetic determinants of relevant phenotypes have not yet been investigated in this species. Because lipid levels are well-established and heritable risk factors for human atherosclerosis, our goal was to assess the heritability of lipoprotein cholesterol and triglyceride levels in a single, extended pedigree of 1,289 Indian-...

The goal of this review article is to provide a conceptual based summary of how heritability estimates for complex traits such as obesity are determined and to explore the future directions of research in the heritability field. The target audience are researchers who use heritability data rather than those conducting heritability studies. The article provides an introduction to key concepts cr...