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Genetic dissection of complex traits

Reference	BBS/E/D/20211553
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor John Woolliams
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	University of Edinburgh
Department	The Roslin Institute
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	2,141,412
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/04/2012
End date	31/03/2017
Duration	59 months

Abstract

This project aims to develop a systems biology approach to dissecting the genetic variation in complex traits. Complex traits are determined by the interaction of genes and the environment. Understanding how genes shape the observed phenotypic variation is relevant for animal breeders, evolutionary biologists, human geneticists and many others. Classical dissection of complex traits has developed techniques that were primarily applied in pursuit of QTL, single loci that explain a large fraction of the genetic variance. Such loci provide natural experiments and could be incorporated into breeding programmes or used to give new insights into treatments for disease. However, emerging from numerous genome-wide association studies in humans and livestock is the issue of the “missing heritability”, where even for strongly heritable traits the large numbers of markers associated with the trait explain only a small fraction of the genetic variation. Responding to this issue raises new questions and requires new approaches to dealing with the challenge of dissecting the genetic variance in complex traits. The direct objectives in this theme will move beyond the locus-centric approach and develop system-centric approaches to dissection. Nevertheless there remains value in identifying classical QTL and there are new sources of data that may offer greater power of detection. Whilst the project is concerned with hypotheses on homology among species in genetic variance and the relative importance of cis/trans and e/m regulatory genetic elements, the novel methodologies developed will be important for those ISP identifying genetic variants. Of particular value across all strategic programmes will be incorporating the use of expression data into the QTL detection.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Not funded via Committee
Research Topics	Animal Health, Systems Biology, Technology and Methods Development
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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