Annoucements: November 2008 Archives

The latest issue of Nature Review Genetics has a paper by Andreas Wagner with some interesting perspective on molecular evolution. I don't plan to discuss it in class, but you might find it interesting. Here's the link.

http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v9/n12/full/nrg2473.html

There's also a paper in PLoS Genetics that you might find interesting. It's an alternative to QTL mapping in which all of the data are used simultaneously to predict phenotypes, and the particular loci that have an important influence on the trait emerge more naturally from the analysis.

http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1000231

James F. Crow, a very distinguished and very influential population geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, has an article that's relevant to today's lecture that just appeared in Annual Review of Genetics -- literally, just appeared. I received a notice in my e-mail box this morning. I've added a link to the article under the detail page for Monday's lecture, since that's the day that has the notes I'll be starting with this morning. Here's the direct link, if you don't want to click through to Monday's notes.

If you haven't had enough quantitative genetics and you want to see a really hairy application of (a) quantitative genetics and (b) Bayesian statistics, there's a seminar in the Department of Statistics this Friday that you won't want to miss.

Hierarchical spatial modeling of additive and dominance genetic
variance for large spatial trial datasets

DATE:   Friday, November 7, 2008
TIME:    4:00 p.m.
PLACE: CLAS Building - Room 344

Professor Sudipto Banerjee
Department of Statistics
University of Minnesota

Click through for the abstract.

I've added some additional information on using QTL Cartographer to the online notes. You can find the new version of the notes from the detail page for 29 October. The new part is the section on interpreting output files. If you've already printed the notes, you only need to print the pages in this new section if you want a copy.

I found a good QTL data set (from maize), so I'll be handing out Problem #4 on Monday. That's the bad news. The good news is that I've decided to make it due on the 14th rather than on the 10th. You'll only have one weekend available, but you'll still have a week and a half to get the analyses done.

I'll hand out the final project on the 17th rather than on the 14th as originally planned.

On a related note, we'll probably spend about half the lecture on Monday going over some more features of QTL Cartographer, and I will try to type up some supplementary notes that you're likely to find useful in doing your QTL project.