Genetic components underlying each of both traits consist of several SNPs with major effects and 1,000 SNPs with polygenic effects.
The anthropometric traits consist of: height (Ht), weight (Wt), waist circumference (WC), hip circumference (HC), bicondilar upper arm width (UAW), upper arm circumference (UAC), and biceps (BiS), triceps (TrS), subscapular (SbS), suprailiac (SpS) and abdominal (AbS) skin-fold thicknesses (Table 1).
123, 139 As such, there is a great deal of debate on what the missing heritability of most complex traits consists of.
Complex traits consist of an unpredictable mix of common, uncommon and rare genetic variants with effect sizes that are inversely related to their frequency.
The informative pedigree for these traits consisted of 1327 maternal links (including mothers that lacked phenotypic information but were informative for relatedness) and 893 paternal links.
Dormancy is a complex trait consisting of seed and hull dormancy.
Together with earlier studies, these findings suggest that the common lizard's carotenoid-based colouration may be a composite trait, consisting of fixed (e.g. genetic) and environmentally elements, the latter reflecting the lizard's PSR.
See related editorial by Blackburn, http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/13/5/112 The genetic component of risk for most common forms of breast cancer defines it as a complex trait consisting of numerous susceptibility alleles and interactions.
However, there is an increasingly complex and uncertain picture emerging from research into immunity in nonhuman species with a growing interest in viewing immunity as a compound trait, consisting of multiple, often unrelated (or even negatively correlated) subcomponents (Adamo 2004; Loker et al. 2004; Lee 2006; Matson et al. 2006; Lawniczak et al. 2007).
To give a simple illustration, consider two traits, and assume merit is positively related to each trait: the first has heritability 0.5, with a phenotype obtained by summing two numbers drawn from N 0,1), the first representing the breeding value, the second representing the environmental deviation; the second trait consists of only the second number, i.e. environmental deviation.
