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Epistasis and the release of genetic variation during long-term selection

Abstract

It is an enigma how long-term selection in model organisms and agricultural species can lead to marked phenotypic changes without exhausting genetic variation for the selected trait. Here, we show that the genetic architecture of an apparently major locus for growth in chicken dissects into a genetic network of four interacting loci. The interactions in this radial network mediate a considerably larger selection response than predicted by a single-locus model.

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Figure 1: Radial network of interacting loci causing a marked amount of phenotypic change in a long-term chicken selection experiment.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Genome Centre at the Rudbeck laboratory for genotyping and S. Johansson, P. Wahlberg, U. Gustafsson and S. Price for technical assistance. This study was funded by the Wallenberg Consortium North, the Foundation for Strategic Research, the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning, the AgriFunGen program at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Arexis AB (L.A.); the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation (Ö.C.) and a European Union motility grant (HPRI-CT-2001-00153) for Ö.C. to visit the Linnaeus Centre for Bioinformatics. We thank the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) for providing computing resources to the project.

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Correspondence to Örjan Carlborg.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Fig. 1

Phenotypic means in the nine possible two-locus genotype classes for the two additional significant epistatic QTL pairs not shown in Figure 1. (PDF 163 kb)

Supplementary Methods (PDF 100 kb)

Supplementary Note (PDF 535 kb)

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Carlborg, Ö., Jacobsson, L., Åhgren, P. et al. Epistasis and the release of genetic variation during long-term selection. Nat Genet 38, 418–420 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1761

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