Estimation of epistatic variance components and heritability in founder populations and crosses.

ABSTRACT: Genetic association studies have explained only a small proportion of the estimated heritability of complex traits, leaving the remaining heritability "missing." Genetic interactions have been proposed as an explanation for this, because they lead to overestimates of the heritability and are hard to detect. Whether this explanation is true depends on the proportion of variance attributable to genetic interactions, which is difficult to measure in outbred populations. Founder populations exhibit a greater range of kinship than outbred populations, which helps in fitting the epistatic variance. We extend classic theory to founder populations, giving the covariance between individuals due to epistasis of any order. We recover the classic theory as a limit, and we derive a recently proposed es

SUBMITTER: Young AI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4256760 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature