Genetics and Analysis of Quantitative Traits

Abstract This book is a fully rewritten and greatly expanded revision of the classic 1997 origin that provided the first modern unified treatment of quantitative genetics, the study of causes of trait variation in nature. The field has critical applications in animal/tree/crop breeding, evolution, ecology, medicine, anthropology, behavior, population genetics, conservation biology, and genomics. Further, much of modern statistics has its roots in problems arising in quantitative genetics. Massive advancements in genomics, genetics, and statistics have occurred in the past two decades, resulting in dramatic changes in both the tools and applications of quantitative genetics relative to those discussed in the first edition. Indeed, the dramatic growth of the field is such that the version had to be spread out over two volumes. This first volume comes basic issues in genetics and statistics, the foundational features of quantitative genetics (Fisher’s variance decomposition and the resemblance between relatives, including marker-based estimates of relatedness), line-cross analysis including inbreeding depression and heterosis, QTL mapping, GWAS, and concludes with quantitative genomics (treating scorable functional genomic features as quantitative traits). The books weaves important biological applications with a full development of the theory and appropriate statistical tools. There are extensive discussion of important linear-algebra tools, linear and mixed models, likelihood and Bayesian estimation, as well as false discovery rates, multiple comparisons and meta-analysis. Over 100 worked examples (ranging from microbes to humans) illustrate the key concepts with real-world applications.