Genetic interactions with sex make a relatively small contribution to the heritability of complex traits in mice.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 24811081.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0096450 and PMC identifier 4014490.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
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.
Medical subject headings
- Genetic Variation
- Phenotype
- Quantitative Trait Loci
- Quantitative Trait, Heritable