Genetic effects are the core concepts from which quantitative genetics and the evolutionary synthesis emerged. The groundbreaking theory of genetic effects was first proposed over a century ago. This book revises that theory, both conceptually and mathematically, and brings it up to date.
- The theory here compiled is supplemented with non-previously-published developments covering the broadest spectrum of simultaneously multiallelic and multilocus architectures with autosomal and sex-linked loci
- Arbitrary interactions (dominance, gene-gene, gene-environment, gene-sex, and parent-of-origin interactions) are accounted for
- Both effects of allele substitutions from the reference of individual genotypes and in the context of populations are worked out
- Populations are considered regardless of any departures from equilibrium frequencies (including both departures from Hardy-Weinberg, departures from linkage equilibrium, and non-random associations between/among genes and environments)
- All developments are derived under the same mathematical framework so that transformations of genetic effects between different contexts are easily allowed
In brief, this book enables novel applications to current empirical paradigms (like gene mapping and genomic prediction) while adhering to the classical conceptualization of genetic effects and variance decomposition that let quantitative genetics and the evolutionary synthesis flourish. All relevant concepts are carefully clarified and discussed from a historical perspective. The theoretical developments presented in the book are illustrated by built-in cases and applications with real data. Reassuringly, the adequacy of the theory here presented is corroborated based on the fundamentals of model development.
Chapter 1: Discovering The Genotype
Chapter 2: The Primeval Theory Of Ge-Netic Effects
Chapter 3: Genetic Effects Over One Century
Chapter 4: Hgenetic Architectures At The Individual Level
Chapter 5: Genetic Effects In Popula-Tions Under Linkage Equilibrium.-
Chapter 6: A General Theory Of Genetic Effects
Chapter 7: Variance Decomposition, Gene Mapping And Average Excesses-Orthogonality In The Spotlight
Chapter 8: Applied Cases Of Advanced Genetic Modelling
Chapter 9: The Comes And Goes Of The Black Box Perspective In Quantitative Genetics
Chapter 10: Addendum: An Acid Test For Noia
José M Álvarez-Castro is a mathematician and biologist by training. He studied the maintenance of variability under selection during his PhD at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). He then moved to Ludwig Maximilian University (Munich, Germany) where he inspected the interplay between selection and genetic architecture of quantitative traits, a project led by Prof. Thomas Hansen at the Florida State University (USA). During his second postdoc, he worked at Prof. OErjan Carlborg's group at Uppsala University (Sweden), where he set up the NOIA model of genetic effects, integrating previous models under a unifying mathematical framework. He then became an assistant professor (at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences). Eventually, he returned to the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he kept on implementing and applying models of genetic effects and variance decomposition as PI. He spent visiting periods at several renowned international institutions, like the Gulbenkian Institute of Science (Oeiras, Portugal) and the Roslin Institute (University of Edinburgh, Scotland). Currently, he has held various assignments at the Department of Education, University, and Professional Training of the autonomous administration Xunta de Galicia (Spain), while remaining connected to the University of Santiago de Compostela as an external collaborator at the Department of Statistics, Mathematical Analysis and Optimization.