title: Genetic interactions with sex make a relatively small contribution to the heritability of complex traits in mice.
abstract: The extent to which sex-specific genetic effects contribute to phenotypic variation is largely unknown. We applied a novel Bayesian method, sparse partitioning, to detect gene by sex (GxS) and gene by gene (GxG) quantitative loci (QTLs) in 1,900 outbred heterogeneous stock mice. In an analysis of 55 phenotypes, we detected 16 GxS and 6 GxG QTLs. The increase in the amount of phenotypic variance explained by models including GxS was small, ranging from 0.14% to 4.30%. We conclude that GxS rarely make a large overall contribution to the heritability of phenotypes, however there are cases where these will be individually important.
authors.affiliation: Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Jon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Krohn
authors.affiliation: UCL Genetics Institute, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Doug
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Speed
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Sciences/Medical Biochemistry, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria.
authors.forename: Rupert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Palme
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Chadi
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Touma
authors.affiliation: Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Mott
authors.affiliation: Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Flint
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D002874:Chromosome Mapping; D005260:Female; D014644:Genetic Variation; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D010641:Phenotype; D040641:Quantitative Trait Loci; D019655:Quantitative Trait, Heritable; D012737:Sex Factors