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Effects of genomic imprinting on quantitative traits

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Abstract

Standard Mendelian genetic processes incorporate several symmetries, one of which is that the level of expression of a gene inherited from an organism’s mother is identical to the level should that gene have been inherited paternally. For a small number of loci in a variety of taxa, this symmetry does not hold; such genes are said to be “genomically imprinted” (or simply “imprinted”). The best known examples of imprinted loci come from mammals and angiosperms, although there are also cases from several insects and some data suggesting that imprinting exists in zebra fish. Imprinting means that reciprocal heterozygotes need not be, on average, phenotypically identical. When this difference is incorporated into the standard quantitative-genetic model for two alleles at a single locus, a number of standard expressions are altered in fundamental ways. Most importantly, in contrast to the case with euMendelian expression, the additive and dominance deviations are correlated. It would clearly be of interest to be able to separate imprinting effects from maternal genetic effects, but when the latter are added to the model, the well-known generalized least-squares approach to deriving breeding values cannot be applied. Distinguishing these two types of parent-of-origin effects is not a simple problem and requires further research.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Bruce Weir and Bill Hill for the invitation to write this review and Anna Santure for her accurate and intricate work on elucidating the interaction between maternal genetic and imprinting effects. Andrew Clark, Marc Feldman, Ian Morison and Tony Weisstein also provided helpful discussions over several years and Bruce Tier pointed out several useful references. This work was supported by the New Zealand National Research Centre for Growth and Development and the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

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  1. National Research Centre for Growth & Development and Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology & Evolution, Department of Zoology, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, 9054, New Zealand

    Hamish G. Spencer

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Correspondence to Hamish G. Spencer.

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Spencer, H.G. Effects of genomic imprinting on quantitative traits. Genetica 136, 285–293 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10709-008-9300-8

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