Prediction and inheritance of phenotypes

Abstract

In the search for functional relationships between genotypes and phenotypes, there are two possible findings. A phenotype may be heritable when it depends on a reduced set of genetic markers. Or it may be predictable from a wide genomic description. The distinction between these two kinds of functional relationships is very important since the computational tools used to find them are quite different. In this paper we present a general framework to deal with phenotypes and genotypes, and we study the case of the height of barley plants: a predictable phenotype whose heritability is quite reduced. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.