Abstract
The attainment of a specific mature body size is one of the most fundamental differences among species of mammals. Moreover, body size seems to be the central factor underlying differences in traits such as growth rate, energy metabolism and body composition. An important proportion of this variability is of genetic origin. The goal of the genetic analysis of animal growth is to understand its "genetic architecture", that is the number and position of loci affecting the trait, the magnitude of their effects, allele frequencies and types of gene action. In this review, the different strategies developed to identify and characterize genes involved in the regulation of growth in the mouse are described, with emphasis on the methods developed to map loci contributing to the regulation of quantitative traits (QTLs).
Highlights
The mature body size of an animal is determined by the number and size of its cells, and the amount of extracellular matrix and fluid [23], with cell number making a major contribution [2]
The association between markers and quantitative traits has been known for a long time [107], it was the development of molecular techniques that allowed the large scale characterization of polymorphic loci at the DNA level which has permitted the search for loci underlying quantitative variation over the last decade
With the current methods for QTL searching, only QTLs with the strongest effects are detected [114]. This bias is inversely related to the stringency of the significance level and it is stronger for dominance effects than for additive effects [63]. These limitations of the methodology preclude a faithful characterization of the genetic architecture of a quantitative trait, they still enable us to utilize the information on the position of QTLs
Summary
The mature body size of an animal is determined by the number and size of its cells, and the amount of extracellular matrix and fluid [23], with cell number making a major contribution [2]. One of the primary objectives of the genetic analysis of animal growth is to understand its “genetic architecture”, that is the number and position of loci affecting the trait, the magnitude of their effects, allele frequencies and types of gene action [12,128]. The mouse has been extensively used as a model to study the genetics of growth in mammals. As of March 2001, 650 genes in MGD were described as having some phenotypic effect on growth. The different strategies developed to identify and characterize genes involved in the regulation of growth in the mouse will be described, with emphasis on the methods developed to map loci associated to the regulation of quantitative traits (QTLs)
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