The book of abstracts is available. - Poznań

14 th QTL-MAS Workshop, Poznań University of Life Sciences, Poland 2010Genetic architecture of quantitative traitsWilliam G. Hill 1∗1 Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh∗ Presenting author: William Hill, email: w.g.hill@ed.ac.ukUnderstanding the ‘black box’ of the genetics of quantitative traits has been a long standingobjective. Important unknowns are the numbers of loci involved, and the distribution of theirfrequencies, effects on the trait and their interactions These depend both on the basicarchitecture and on the selective and other forces whereby variation is lost or maintained.Some information has come at the quantitative level from covariances among relatives,inbreeding and selection experiments which indicate many loci are responsible. Theavailability of dense markers provides the opportunity for deeper study, but although somegenes of large effect have been detected, genome wide association studies of traits in humansalso indicate many loci are contributing to variation.I shall discuss what we may expect on the basis of population genetics theory and knowledgeof parameters to be the distributions of effects and frequencies, how these influenceinferences that can be drawn from GWAS and similar studies, and how these relate toobservations.12