Journal Article

The genetic analysis of age-dependent traits: modeling the character process.

Abstract

The extension of classical quantitative genetics to deal with function-valued characters (also called infinite-dimensional characters) such as growth curves, mortality curves, and reaction norms, was begun by Kirkpatrick and coworkers. In this theory, the analogs of variance components for single traits are covariance functions for function-valued traits. In the approach presented here, we employ a variety of parametric models for covariance functions that have a number of desirable properties: the functions (1) are positive definite, (2) can be estimated using procedures like those currently used for single traits, (3) have a small number of parameters, and (4) allow simple hypotheses to be easily tested. The methods are illustrated using data from a large experiment that examined the effects of spontaneous mutations on age-specific mortality rates in Drosophila melanogaster. Our methods are shown to work better than a standard multivariate analysis, which assumes the character value at each age is a distinct character. Advantages over existing methods that model covariance functions as a series of orthogonal polynomials are discussed. (© 2000 BY THE GENETICS SOCIETY OF AMERICA)