Quantitative Genetics Isn’t Dead Yet
By Peter Visscher, University of Queensland, Australia
Biography: Peter Visscher FRS is a quantitative geneticist with research interests focussed on a better understanding of genetic variation for complex traits in human populations, including quantitative traits and disease, and on systems genomics. The first half of his research career to date was predominantly in livestock genetics (animal breeding is applied quantitative genetics), whereas the last 15 years he has contributed to methods, software and applications to quantify and dissect genetic variation in human traits.
The discipline of quantitative genetics (QG) was established more than a century ago, and most agree that RA Fisher’s 1918 publication, which reconciled Mendelian genetics with the resemblance between relatives for quantitative traits, is its foundation paper. It was mostly theoretical for the first half of the 20th century but became much more empirical in the latter half, with empirical tests of theory using selection experiments and applications in plant and animal breeding. As eloquently summarised by Bill Hill in a 2010 Royal Society publication, QG as a discipline has been written off many times in the last 40 years, in particular when the molecular biology revolution started to flex its muscles in the 1980s. Surely it was just a matter of little time before the few relevant mutations for each trait would be found and quantitative genetics would become a mere sub-branch of molecular genetics? If only. I will show that not only is QG alive and kicking, it has revolutionised many fields of research in the last ~15 years, including plant and animal breeding, human genetics, and evolutionary and ecological genetics. Examples will be given of how the combination of whole-genome genetic data and trait information has led to new insights into (i) the polygenic basis of complex traits (including common disease), (ii) the partitioning of genetic variation between and within families and (iii) the effects of natural selection and non-random mating on trait
variation.
