Editorial: The applications of new multi-locus gwas methodologies in the genetic dissection of complex traits

Abstract

Since the establishment of the mixed linear model (MLM) method for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) by Zhang et al. (2005) and Yu et al. (2006), a series of new MLM-based methods havebeenproposed(Fengetal.,2016).Thesemethodshavebeenwidelyusedingeneticdissection of complex and omics-related traits (Figure1), especially in conjunction with the development of advanced genomic sequencing technologies. However, most existing methods are based on single marker association in genome-wide scans with population structure and polygenic background controls. To control false positive rate, Bonferroni correction for multiple tests is frequently adopted. This stringent correction results in the exclusion of important loci, especially for large experimental error inherent in field experiments of crop genetics. To address this issue, multi-locus GWASmethodologies havebeenrecommended, i.e.,mrMLM(Wangetal.,2016),ISISEM-BLASSO(Tambaetal.,2017),pLARmEB(Zhangetal.,2017),FASTmrEMMA(Wenetal.,2018a), pKWmEB (Ren et al., 2018), and FASTmrMLM (Zhang and Tamba, 2018). Here we summarize theiradvantagesandpotentiallimitationsforusingthesemethods(Table1).