Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Lecture, chapter 5 - Polygenic and multifactorial inheritance

We continued the lecture we started yesterday, on polygenic and multifactorial inheritance, a field of genetics that departs from the Mendelian approach. Although individual genes behave according to Mendel's principles, traits that are controlled my more than one gene or are affected by the environment don't show Mendelian proportions in the phenotype of offspring generations.

We defined complex traits, including polygenic and multifactorial, and we introduced the concept of quantitative genetics. We discussed some concepts that are important in the field, like phenotypic distribution, distribution of environments, norm of reaction, and heritability.

---------------------

No comments: