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An heritable quantitative trait is a measurable phenotype that depends on the cumulative actions of many genes, and the environment. These traits can vary among individuals, over a range, to produce a continuous distribution of phenotypes. Examples include height, weight and blood pressure.
Genomic studies of Heliconius butterflies provide evidence that Heliconius elevatus is a hybrid species, and that its speciation was driven by introgression of traits from Heliconius melpomene into the other parent, an ancestor of Heliconius pardalinus.
In this Review, Mackay and Anholt discuss how epistasis and pleiotropy contribute to the genetic architecture of quantitative traits and outline factors that might explain observed differences in their prevalence between model organisms and humans.
A Mendelian randomization study suggests that apolipoprotein B potentially contributes to shortened healthspan and increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
In this Journal Club, Loic Yengo discusses a study by Tenesa et al., who used height as a model complex trait to estimate the degree to which height similarity between spouses is caused by mate choice.
A recent study in Science demonstrates how capturing gene expression over a developmental time course enables the discovery of dynamic expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) that would otherwise be challenging to find.
Using a systems genetics approach, a new study identifies genetic variants and proteins associated with plasma and hepatic lipid abundance and hepatic lipotoxicity.
A study in Nature Genetics reports the first genome-wide significant loci for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and implicates biologically informative genes, such as FOXP2, as contributors to its aetiology.
