Evolution in health and medicine Sackler colloquium: Genetic architecture of a complex trait and its implications for fitness and genome-wide association studies.

Abstract excerpt

A model is investigated in which mutations that affect a complex trait (e.g., heart disease) also affect fitness because the trait is a component of fitness or because the mutations have pleiotropic effects on fitness. The model predicts that the genetic variance, and hence the heritability, in the trait is contributed by mutations at low frequency in the population, unless the mean strength of selection of...

Topics

• Genetic Variation
• Genome-Wide Association Study
• Humans
• Mutation
• Selection, Genetic