1. Introduction to Quantitative Genetics
These lecture notes will be posted on the course’s website, but if you are interested in finding out more about this topic, you can check out Chapter 20 in Griffiths et al., Introduction to Genetic Analysis. 8th Edition, or ask me- I’ll repeat my contact details at the end of the lecture.

2. Genetics The study of heredity
The study of how differences between individuals are transmitted from one generation to the next
The study of how information in the genes is used in the development and functioning of the adult organism

3. Major Subdisciplines of Genetics
Transmission Genetics
It focuses on the transmission of genes and chromosomes in individuals from generation to generation.
Molecular Genetics
It focuses on the structure and function of genes at the molecular level.
Population Genetics
It focuses on heredity in groups of individuals for traits determined by one or only a few genes.
Quantitative Genetics
It focuses on heredity in groups of individuals for traits determined by many genes simultaneously (Quantitative characteristics).
It focuses on the relationship between offspring and parents

4. Parent-offspring relationship
Both parents and offspring may experience the same environmental conditions
Such a situation could arise if there are strong preferences of the offspring for their natal environment. Offspring may return to the same general area for nesting in which there were raised
The phenotype of the offspring may be determined by the phenotype but not the genotype of the parent
the ability of parents to provide food to their offspring depends on their condition which is determined by environmental factors
The correspondence between the phenotype of the offspring and the parents is a consequence, in part, of the genes shared by the individuals

5. Quantitative Characteristics
Many traits in humans and other organisms are genetically influenced, but do not show single-gene (Mendelian) patterns of inheritance.
They are influenced by the combined action of many genes and are characterized by continuous variation. These are called polygenic traits.
Continuously variable characteristics that are both polygenic and influenced by environmental factors are called multifactorial traits. Examples of quantitative characteristics are height, intelligence & hair color.

6. Types of Quantitative Traits
Quantitative characteristics are usually described by a measurement (quantity).
Example: How tall are you?
Some quantitative traits are meristic (measured in whole numbers). For example, litter size.
Another type of quantitative trait is a threshold characteristic which is either present or absent depending on the cumulative effect of a number of additive factors (diseases are often this type).

7. Types of Quantitative Trait
In general, the distribution of quantitative traits values in a population follows the normal distribution (also known as Gaussian distribution or bell curve). These curves are characterized by the mean (mid-point) and by the variance (width). Often standard deviation, the square root of variance, is used as a measure of the curve’s width.
1. continuous trait: can take on any value: height, for example.
2. countable (meristic) can take on integer values only: number of bristles, for example.
3. threshold trait: has an underlying quantitative distribution, but the trait only appears only if a threshold is crossed.

8. Principles of Quantitative Inheritance
Quantitative traits are influenced by the combined effects of numerous genes. These are called polygenic or multifactorial traits.
The genes follow Mendelian laws of inheritance; however, multifactorial traits have numerous possible phenotypic categories.
Environmental influences blur the phenotypic differences between adjacent genotypes.

9. Number of phenotypic categories =
As the number of loci affecting the trait increases, the # phenotypic categories increases.
Number of phenotypic categories =
(# gene pairs × 2) +1
Connecting the points of a frequency distribution creates a bell-shaped curve called a normal distribution.

10. (average -center of distribution)
Normal Distribution
Mean
Standard
Deviation
(average -center of distribution)
Mean +/- 1s = 66% of values; +/- 2s = over 95% of values

11. Quantitative Genetics
not discrete
Continuous phenotypic variation within populations
Whole organism level
Causes of variation
Genes vs. environment
Interactions between genes and environment
Components of genetic variation
Components of environmental variation
In a very general sense, quantitative genetics is concerned with continuous or quantitative phenotypic variation within populations. Continuous or quantitative as opposed to discrete traits (such as blood type, where you are one or the other, or blue vs. yellow flowers, if there is really nothing in between). By phenotypic variation, I mean variation in traits that you can measure- generally at the whole-organism level- body size, running speed, reproductive output, but can also be at the physiological level, e.g., hormone levels.
Quantitative genetics is concerned with continuous variation, and specifically with determining how much variation is caused by what (i.e., partitioning the components of variation). So there is variation due to the effects of genes and variation due to the effects of the environment, which is an age-old question, and quantitative genetics in part seeks to answer it (how much variation is due to genes vs. environment) but also takes into account the complexities of this question (interactions between genes and environments; different components of genetic and environmental variation). This issue is something I’ll come back to a couple of times in this talk.

12. Why is quantitative genetics important?
Medicine
Disease = variation
Complex disorders
caused by multiple genetic and environmental factors
Understanding genetic vs. environmental causes
prevention
genetic counselling
genetically-tailored treatments
There are many examples where variation within species is important to us, and where the extent to which variation is determined by genetics is important to us.
Medicine is a major area where variation is important because disease is one form of variation. Medical genetics is concerned with identifying the genes responsible for disorders which have a ‘simple’ genetic basis, i.e., where the disorder is caused by a single gene, but over the last couple of decades there has been an enormous effort made to try to identify the genetics responsible for complex disorders –‘complex’ meaning that there are multiple genetic and environmental influences. This kind of work often focuses on continuous traits such as high blood pressure.
Here, understanding how much variation is due to genetic vs. environmental causes is important for prevention (you can potentially do something about the environmental causes), genetic counselling (for where there may be alleles that predispose certain people to a condition), genetically-tailored treatments. So this work isn’t just about identifying genes responsible for disease, but studying how the environment may influence the effects of a gene that predisposes people to a certain condition. e.g., smoking, diet.

13. Why is quantitative genetics important?
Agriculture
Economically important traits = quantitative traits
Quantitative genetics theory -> basis for breeding programs
Environmental variation reduces efficiency of selection
Quantitative genetics has also played a major role in agriculture over the last 100 years or so because economically important traits milk production and fruit size are quantitative traits that people really want to be able to improve/manipulate. Obviously people have been doing artificial selection for thousands of years, which is why agricultural species may look very different from their wild relatives (e.g., Teosinte vs. maize). But for more than 50 years, quantitative genetic theory has been heavily used as the basis for breeding programs and many of the developments in quantitative genetics have come from people doing agricultural-related research.
Here, understanding the importance of genetic and environmental variation is important because enviro variation reduces the efficiency of selection.

14. Why is quantitative genetics important?
Consequences of inbreeding and out-crossing
Agriculture – inbred lines, hybrids, F1s
Conservation – endangered species, captive breeding programs
Quantitative genetics is also concerned with the consequences of inbreeding and outcrossing, which is important in agriculture because they use inbred lines and hybrids/ F1s. In a similar vein, this is also relevant to conservation issues and endangered species, captive breeding programs, because there may be problems due to inbreeding because of small population sizes.

15. Why is quantitative genetics important?
Evolution
Natural selection requires heritable variation for traits
What are the forces that maintain variation within populations?
Balance between selection, drift and mutation
Balancing selection?
Of course studying the genetic basis of variation is important to evolutionary biology because in order for evolution by natural selection to happen, there has to be heritable variation for phenotypic traits. So ‘survival of the fittest’ is only interesting if there is some genetic component to being fit.
Some of the specific questions in evolutionary biology which are basically about quantitative genetics include:
-What are the forces that maintain variation within populations? If there is survival of the fittest, why doesn’t selection eliminate all of the less fit, leading to entire populations composed of genetically identical, highly fit individuals? There is a balance between selection, which gets rid of variation, random genetic drift (loss of rare alleles by chance) which gets rid of variation and ‘replenishing’ force of mutation. Another factor which may contribute to the maintenance of variation is balancing selection, where selection on certain traits, or in certain environments favours certain alleles, while selection on other traits, or in other environments favours other alleles.

16. Why is quantitative genetics important?
Evolution
Does evolution proceed by small steps or big jumps?
What is the relative importance of pre-existing variation vs. new mutations?
Do genetic correlations between traits pose constraints on evolution?
-Does evolution proceed by small, gradual steps, or by big jumps, separated by long periods where nothing much happens?
-What is the relative importance of pre-existing variation vs. new mutations to adaptation? Obviously as we have evolved and chimps have involved, there have been new mutations involved – variation that was not present in our ancestors millions of years ago. However – how much can a population adapt just by changes in the frequency of alleles that exist at any one time?
-To what extent do genetic correlations between traits pose constraints on the evolutionary process? If there is a genetic correlation between traits A and B, then that means that selection on trait A can result in indirect selection on trait B, or else a different kind of selection on trait B can counter the selection on trait A.
So quantitative genetics is a neat field that is concerned with both evolutionary questions and proximate mechanisms- it attempts to use a ‘how’ approach to address ‘why’ questions.

17. History Around 1900, there were two camps: Biometricians Mendelians
Continuous traits
Mendelians
Discrete traits
Quantitative genetics is a field which has an interesting history. By that I mean that in some fields I feel like you can kind of ignore the history, because they used to think something, but then they found that was wrong, so the old stuff kind of feels a bit irrelevant and you don’t need to know it. But in quantitative genetics, you can really see traces of its history in modern research, because at some levels, we’re still trying to answer the same questions as they were 100 years ago. So at the beginning of the 20th century, you kind of had 2 camps:Biometricians The Biometricians, who were influenced by Francis Galton’s work in late 1800s on continuously varying characters, and the inheritance of such traits (e.g., association between parents and children).
Mendelians And the Mendelians who were interested in the rediscovery of Mendel’s work, which provided an explanation for the inheritance of discreet characters such as purple vs. white flower color, smooth vs. wrinkled seeds
There was some debate as to whether discrete traits were inherited in the same way as quantitative traits.
Are discrete traits inherited in the same way as quantitative traits?

18. History Reconciliation: Multiple loci (genes) contribute to variation!
A reconciliation of these two approaches came with the idea that multiple loci contribute to variation (aka multiple factor hypothesis (actually suggested by Mendel years earlier)). That could explain how Mendelian rules of inheritance could lead to the inheritance of continuous traits.
But the question of whether a substantial amount of variation is caused by a few loci of large effects, vs. many loci of small effects is still a major one today.
Is variation caused by a few loci of large effects or many loci with small effects?

19. Heterosis
Both the parental lines and the F1’s are genetically uniform. However, the parental lines are relatively small and weak, a phenomenon called “inbreeding depression”: Too much homozygosity leads to small, sickly and weak organisms, at least among organisms that usually breed with others instead of self-pollinating.
In contrast, the F1 hybrids are large, healthy and strong. This phenomenon is called “heterosis” or “hybrid vigor”.
The corn planted in the US and other developed countries in nearly all F1 hybrid seed, because it produces high yielding, healthy plants (due to heterosis) and it is genetically uniform (and thus matures at the same time with ears in the same position on every plant).

20. Mathematical Basis of Quantitative Genetics
Recall the basic premise of quantitative genetics: phenotype = genetics plus environment.
In fact we are looking at variation in the traits, which is measured by the width of the Gaussian distribution curve. This width is the variance (or its square root, the standard deviation).
Variance is a useful property, because variances from different sources can be added together to get total variance.
However, the units of variance are the squares of the units used to measure the trait. Thus, if length in centimeters was measured, the variances of the length are in cm2. This is why standard deviation is usually reported: length ± s.d. --because standard deviation is in the same units as the original measurement. Standard deviations from different sources are not additive.
Quantitative traits can thus be expressed as:
VT = VG + VE
where VT = total variance, VG - variance due to genetics, and VE = variance due to environmental (non-inherited) causes.
This equation is often written with an additional covariance term: the degree to which genetic and environmental variance depend on each other. We are just going to assume this term equals zero in our discussions.

21. Heritability
One property of interest is “heritability”, the proportion of a trait’s variation that is due to genetics (with the rest of it due to “environmental” factors). This seems like a simple concept, but it is loaded with problems.
The broad-sense heritability, symbolized as H (sometimes H2 to indicate that the units of variance are squared). H is a simple translation of the statement from above into mathematics:
H = VG / VT
This measure, the broad-sense heritability, is fairly easy to measure, especially in human populations where identical twins are available. However, different studies show wide variations in H values for the same traits, and plant breeders have found that it doesn’t accurately reflect the results of selection experiments. Thus, H is generally only used in social science work.

22. Heritability h2 = genetic variation phenotypic variation
Measured using resemblance between relatives
h2 = genetic variation
phenotypic variation
Genetic + environmental + interaction
In a moment, I’ll describe approaches that are used to identify those genetic loci that contribute to variation, but of course before you go out and try to identify genetic loci contributing to variation, you want to be sure that such loci exist, i.e., that there is heritable variation in the trait, and this involves measuring the heritability, which is done by measuring the resemblance between relatives.
-a bit about heritability, this is the proportion of phenotypic variation that is due to genetic variation. The total phenotypic variation is made up of genetic variation and environmental variation and potentially interaction between the two, so its important to note that heritability depends on a particular environment. It is NOT a fixed value and NOT an answer to the nature/nurture question. The amount of genetic variation may differ between populations, e.g., it will be very low in an inbred population. Similarly, the amount of environmental variation may differ between environments. So say for body size- in the wild you may get lots of environmental variation due to variation in food supply, so the denominator will be high relative to the numerator, and you will get a low heritability, BUT- if you were to bring that same population into the lab, where the environmental conditions are controlled, that would reduce environmental variation, and so reduce the denominator and the heritability would be higher, even if the genetic variation remained constant.
But for now, let’s just consider the genetic loci that contribute to continuous variation.

23. Heritability (broad-sense)
Heritability (broad-sense) is the proportion of a population’s phenotypic variance that is attributable to genetic differences

24. Additive vs. Dominance Genetic Variance
The biggest problem with broad sense heritability comes from lumping all genetic phenomena into a single Vg factor. Paradoxically, not all variation due to genetic differences can be directly inherited by an offspring from the parents.
Genetic variance can be split into 2 main components, additive genetic variance (VA) and dominance genetic variance (VD).
VG = VA + VD
Additive variance is the variance in a trait that is due to the effects of each individual allele being added together, without any interactions with other alleles or genes.
Dominance variance is the variance that is due to interactions between alleles: synergy, effects due to two alleles interacting to make the trait greater (or lesser) than the sum of the two alleles acting alone. We are using dominance variance to include both interactions between alleles of the same gene and interactions between difference genes, which is sometimes a separate component called epistasis variance.
The important point: dominance variance is not directly inherited from parent to offspring. It is due to the interaction of genes from both parents within the individual, and of course only one allele is passed from each parent to the offspring.

25. Heritability (narrow sense)
Heritability (narrow sense) is the proportion of a population’s phenotypic variance that is attributable to additive genetic variance as opposed to dominance genetic variance (interaction between alleles at the same locus).
Additive genetic variance responds to selection

26. Narrow Sense Heritability
For a practical breeder, dominance variance can’t be predicted, and it doesn’t affect the mean or variance of the offspring of a selection cross in a systematic fashion. Thus, only additive genetic variance is useful. Breeders and other scientists use “narrow sense heritability”, h, as a measure of heritability.
h = VA / VT
Narrow sense heritability can also be calculated directly from breeding experiments. For this reason it is also called “realized heritability”.

27. The genetic Correlation
Traits are not inherited as independent unit, but the several traits tend to be associated with each other
This phenomenon can arise in 2 ways:
A subset of the genes that influence one trait may also influence another trait (pleiotropy)
The genes may act independently on the two traits, but due to non random mating, selection, or drift, they may be associated (linkage disequilibrium)

28. Basic formula:. rG = covXY / (varX ∙ varY)0
  Basic formula: rG = covXY / (varX ∙ varY)0.5 rG often used both for additive (rA) and genotypic (rG) correlation!   Phenotypic correlation: A combination of genetic and environmental (incl. nonadd gen effects) corr: rP = hX ∙ hY ∙ rG + (1-h2X)0.5 ∙ (1-h2Y)0.5 ∙ rE rP = hX ∙ hY ∙ rG + eX ∙ eY∙ rE The magnitude and even the sign of rG cannot be determined from rP alone!

29. The use of genetic correlations 1. Trait-trait correlation
The use of genetic correlations 1. Trait-trait correlation Relation between different traits. For studies of how the improvement of one trait will affect another trait. 2. Age-age correlation Relation between a trait at young and mature age. Gives info about when reliable estimations can be achieved. 3. Site-site correlation Relation between genotype and environment. For deliniation of breeding and seed zones and for optimization of number of trials per zone   Another basic use of rG is prediction of genetic gain.

30. Two basic estimations of rG:
Burdon correlation, type A: Both traits are measured on the same individual (true genetic corr.). Trait-trait and age-age correlations
Burdon correlation, type B: Two traits are measured on different individuals (approximated genetic corr.). One trait expressed at two sites are considered as two different traits. Site-site correlations.

31. Some features of genetic correlations rG = covXY / (varX ∙ varY)0
Some features of genetic correlations rG = covXY / (varX ∙ varY)0.5   1) The three components are hard to estimate with any precision, i.e. large materials are needed.   2) Strongly influenced by gene frequencies, i.e. it is valid for a certain population only. Genetic correlations are easily changed by selection. .

32. Correlated reponse   If we select for character X, what will be the change of the correlated character Y? CRY = i ∙ hX ∙ hY ∙ rG ∙ σPY , where CRY = the correlated response in trait Y, i = the intensity of selection, hX and hY = the square root of the h2 rG = the genetic correlation between traits X and Y σPY = the phenotypic standard deviation for trait Y.   The CRY can be expressed in percent by relating it to the phenotypic mean of variable Y.

33. Indirect selection When we want to improve character X, but select for another character (Y) and achieve progress due to the correlated response. CRX / RX = (iY ∙ rA ∙ hY) / (iX ∙ hX) Presumptions: HY > HX and strong CR or iY > iX. Usable when difficult to apply selection directly to the desired character: 1) Hard to measure with any precision, which reduces h2 2) The desired trait is costly to measure. Then it would be better to select for an easily measurable, correlated trait.

34. G x E interaction Scale effects True interaction Both scale and
Parallell and
no reaction norm
Scale effects
True interaction
Both scale and
true interaction

35. It is the ”true interactions” that should affect breeding strategies.
Scale effects can be handled by transformation prior to analysis to ensure homogenity of among-genotype variances in environments.
The question is whether breeding should be producing genotypes suitable for specific environments or genotypes adapted to a wide range of environments?
G x E can be used in practice when interactions and the specific environments are well defined.
The smaller G x E, the fewer test sites are needed.

36. Calculations of G x E
ANOVA according to the simple model: Y = G + E + G ∙ E.
The model assumes homogenous variances between sites. Scale effects (not true interactions) will generate an interaction!
Not independent of whether environment is a fixed or random effect.

37. 2. G x E as genetic correlations:
I. Yamada: r G= varG / (varG + varI)
varG = genetic variance component from ANOVA involving data from two environments and varI = G x E variance component from ANOVA.
II. Burdon: rG = rXY / (hX · hY)
rXY = phenotypic correlation between family means in environment X and Y
hX · hY = square roots of heritabilities of the genetic family means in environment X and Y.
III. GCA-approach: rG = r / (rax · ray)
r = Pearson correlation between BLUP-values in environment X and Y
rax · ray = estimated relation between the “true” and the “predicted” breeding values calculated as (h2 ∙ k) / (1+h2(k-1)) where k is the harmonic mean of the number of replications per family.

38. Type B correlations are routinely made by univariate methods
Problems:
1) Correlation estimates are biased for unbalanced data and when variances across environments are heterogenous.
2) The estimates are frequently out of the theoretical parameter space due to sampling errors of genetic variances and covariances (rG > 1.0).
3) The correlations are seldom normally distributed unless the test population is large. Std err of genetic correlations are difficult to estimate and are often approximated! Estimates of std err. should be interpreted with caution. However they indicate the relatively reliability.