The psychiatric genetics field is currently undergoing a crisis due to the decades-long failure to uncover the genes believed to cause the major psychiatric disorders. Since 2009, leading researchers have explained these negative results on the basis of the ‘‘missing heritability’’ argument, which holds that more effective research methods must be developed to uncover presumed missing genes. Ac...

This article reviews the concept of an endophenotype, with particular reference to heritability as well as diagnostic specificity. An endophenotype need not be heritable, for example, the possible influence of in utero viral infections for schizophrenia. However, heritability is a useful characteristic for a potential endophenotype, as it can be studied in relation to a plausible candidate gene...

To estimate the heritability values of characters frequently used as selective criteria, 32 half-sib families obtained from selected plants of three populations of the asparagus variety Argenteüil were evaluated in a randomized complete block design. The following characters were measured: days to emergence of the first spear, number and diameter of spears, number of stalks, plant height and av...

We examine the heritability of psychological resilience among US adults aged 25 to 74 years. Using monozygotic and same sex dizygotic twin pairs from the National Survey of Mid-Life Development in the United States (MIDUS) we show that positive affect is equally heritable among men (h2 = .60) and women (h2 = .59). We then estimate the heritability of positive affect after controlling for an exh...

The dominant phenotype of greying with age in horses, caused by a 4.6-kb duplication in intron 6 of STX17, is associated with a high incidence of melanoma and vitiligo-like skin depigmentation. However, the progressive greying and the incidence of melanoma, vitiligo-like depigmentation, and amount of speckling in these horses do not follow a simple inheritance pattern. To understand their inher...

The heritability of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) has been estimated at 37% based largely on twin studies that rely on contested assumptions. More recently, the heritability of MDD has been estimated on large populations from registries such as the Swedish, Finnish, and Chinese cohorts. Family-based designs utilise a number of different relationships and provide an alternative means of estima...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The contribution of genetics to stroke risk, and whether this differs for different stroke subtypes, remainsuncertain. Genomewide complex trait analysis allows heritability to be assessed from genomewide association study (GWAS) data. Previous candidate gene studies have identified many associations with stoke but whether these are important requires replication in large ...

I evolved boolean regulatory networks in a computer simulation. I varied mutation, recombination, the size of the network, and the number of connections per node. I measured the performance of networks and the heritability and epistasis of genetic effects. Networks of intermediate connectivity performed best. The distinction between metabolic and quantitative genetic additivity explained some o...

Our long-term objective is to identify genes whose expression results in hypertension and in phenotypic changes that may contribute to hypertension. The purpose of the present study was to describe evidence for the heritability of hypertension-related phenotypes in hypertensive, hyperlipidemic black sib pairs. Outpatient anthropomorphic measurements were obtained in >200 affected sib pairs. In ...

The influences of heredity and environment on behaviour are sometimes quantified as a heritability ratio, which assigns a percentage of variation in test scores to variation in the genotypes of individuals. There are compelling reasons, both biological and statistical, to doubt the validity of the common practice of partitioning variance in this manner. This paper outlines the conceptual founda...