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From Mendel to quantitative genetics in the genome era: the scientific legacy of W. G. Hill

Nature Genetics volume 54, pages 934–939 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

The quantitative geneticist W. G. (‘Bill’) Hill, awardee of the 2018 Darwin Medal of the Royal Society and the 2019 Mendel Medal of the Genetics Society (United Kingdom), died on 17 December 2021 at the age of 81 years. Here, we pay tribute to his multiple key scientific contributions, which span population and evolutionary genetics, animal and plant breeding and human genetics. We discuss his theoretical research on the role of linkage disequilibrium (LD) and mutational variance in the response to selection, the origin of the widely used LD metric r2 in genomic association studies, the genetic architecture of complex traits, the quantification of the variation in realized relationships given a pedigree relationship and much more. We demonstrate that basic theoretical research in quantitative and statistical genetics has led to profound insights into the genetics and evolution of complex traits and made predictions that were subsequently empirically validated, often decades later.

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Fig. 1: Five intertwined strands that shape genetic variance for complex traits within populations.
Fig. 2: Citations of two key Hill papers on LD.
Fig. 3: Distribution of the proportion of the genome shared identical-by-descent in a selected number of relative pairs.
Fig. 4: Relationships among polygenicity, inbreeding depression and dominance variance.

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Data availability

The code used to create Fig. 3 is available at https://github.com/loic-yengo/Hill-and-Weir-2011—revisited.

Change history

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Acknowledgements

P.M.V. is supported by grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council (1113400) and the Australian Research Council (FL180100072). N.R.W. is supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council (1113400 and 1173790). K.M. was supported by Meat and Livestock Australia (grant L.GEN.2204). We thank J. Sidorenko and L. Yengo for help with the figures. We acknowledge the many friends and colleagues of Bill Hill who would have loved to contribute to this paper and who would have been qualified to do so.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Brian Charlesworth, Michael E. Goddard, Karin Meyer, Peter M. Visscher, Bruce S. Weir, Naomi R. Wray.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biological Sciences, Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Brian Charlesworth

  2. Centre for AgriBioscience, Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia

    Michael E. Goddard

  3. Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

    Michael E. Goddard

  4. AGBU, a joint venture of NSW Department of Primary Industries and University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

    Karin Meyer

  5. Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

    Peter M. Visscher & Naomi R. Wray

  6. Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Bruce S. Weir

  7. Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

    Naomi R. Wray

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Correspondence to Peter M. Visscher.

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Charlesworth, B., Goddard, M.E., Meyer, K. et al. From Mendel to quantitative genetics in the genome era: the scientific legacy of W. G. Hill. Nat Genet 54, 934–939 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-022-01103-1

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