Variance-controlling genes
First published on my old blog in August 2012; lightly edited for this site.
The August 2012 issue of PLoS Genetics brought an interesting article by Xia Shen and colleagues from the Computational Genetics Section at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. They show that polymorphisms and mutations can affect not only the mean of a trait but also its variance.
After developing the necessary theory, the authors use an Arabidopsis thaliana dataset from Magnus Nordborg’s lab to pinpoint examples of such variance-controlling genes. It is clearly shown that the classical GWAS approach can completely miss genetic effects that influence trait variance. They propose an extended approach, called vGWAS, that helps discover variance-controlling genes.
Read it: Shen X, Pettersson M, Rönnegård L, Carlborg Ö (2012). Inheritance beyond plain heritability: variance-controlling genes in Arabidopsis thaliana. PLoS Genetics 8(8): e1002839. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1002839