These assays can be cost-effective for large sample sizes (1000 s-10,000 s) and are ideal when trait-predictive SNP markers are available for selection of large effect genes in breeding programs; however, their cost advantage is lost for applications involving small numbers of lines or requiring more than 100 200 genome-wide SNP markers.
The artificially induced mutant approach is suitable mainly for the detection and cloning of large effect genes, but lack the power to detect the ones with small effect as well as the genetic interactions between them.
Importantly, 16 of the large effect genes in our KO group C are altered in Mo, an element not measured by Eide and co-workers, explaining why these large effect genes were not identified by Eide et al., [ 16].
Bt resistance is typically controlled by single large effect genes, with resistance being recessive at high doses of Cry toxin [ 6].
Thus, the accuracy of a biomarker based on a large-effect gene may vary depending not only on variations in that gene, but also on variations in the many genes with small effects.
Is there uniform potential for novelty across a genome or, on the contrary, can a small number of large-effect genes explain the phenotypic variation observed within and between species?
In Arabidopsis, flowering is controlled by a small number of large-effect genes such as FLC (Salome et al., 2011), whereas in maize is controlled by many additive small-effect quantitative trait loci (QTLs) (Buckler et al., 2009).
For example, many breeding programs tend to concentrate on incorporating large-effect genes into mega-varieties, such as IR64 in Southeast Asia, Swarna, Sambha Mahsuri, MTU1010 in India, and BR11 in Bangladesh.
This study involved fewer than 200 children, arguing for the role of large-effect genes in pharmacogenetics.
Large-effect genes are particularly cross-dependent, because neither of the major loci (effect contribution above 20%) detected here was present in any other population.
