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Theory for the number of genes affecting quantitative characters

II. Biases from drift, dominance, inequality of gene effects, linkage disequilibrium and epistasis

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Summary

Bias in the estimation of gene number from a population of finite size will be reduced when the number of generations and the selection differential in the primary selection program are increased. A procedure to minimize bias due to dominance is proposed. Bias due to linkage disequilibrium is decreased by long generations of selection and small change of linkage disequilibrium. Bias due to inequality of gene effects was studied assuming that gene effects follow a half normal distribution. The epistatic bias arising from multiplicative gene effects disappears when the logarithms of the original measurements are considered even though the gene number estimate is unsatisfactory without transformation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Statistics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

    Y. C. Park

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  1. Y. C. Park
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Communicated by R.W. Allard

From a thesis submitted by the author in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. Received March, 1975. Work supported by Public Health Service Grant GM 16074, by the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station and by National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences Grant 5 T32 ES07011-02.

Former Research Assistant, Genetics and Cell Biology, University of Minnesota; currently Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Health Measurement and Statistics.

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Park, Y.C. Theory for the number of genes affecting quantitative characters. Theoret. Appl. Genetics 50, 163–172 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00277737

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00277737

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