Work

Genetic Interactions with Sex Make a Relatively Small Contribution to the Heritability of Complex Traits in Mice

Year: 2014

Type: article

Abstract: The extent to which sex-specific genetic effects contribute to phenotypic variation is largely unknown. We applied a novel Bayesian method, sparse partitioning, to detect gene by sex (GxS) and gene by gene (GxG) quantitative loci (QTLs) in 1,900 outbred heterogeneous stock mice. In an analysis of 55 phenotypes, we detected 16 GxS and 6 GxG QTLs. The increase in the amount of phenotypic variance explained by models including GxS was small, ranging from 0.14% to 4.30%. We conclude that GxS rarely make a large overall contribution to the heritability of phenotypes, however there are cases where these will be individually important.

Source: PLoS ONE

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0096450

Authors: Jon Krohn, Doug Speed, Rupert Palme, Chadi Touma, Richard Mott, Jonathan Flint