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Updated: Jun 24, 2026
A Quantitative Fitness Analysis Workflow
Published on: August 13, 2012
A Bayesian QTL linkage analysis of the common dataset from the 12th QTLMAS workshop
Marco C A M Bink1, Fred A van Eeuwijk
1Biometris, Wageningen University & Research centre, Bornsesteeg 47, 6708 PD, Wageningen, Netherlands. marco.bink@wur.nl
Background:
To compare the power of various QTL mapping methodologies, a dataset was simulated within the framework of 12th QTLMAS workshop. A total of 5865 diploid individuals was simulated, spanning seven generations, with known pedigree. Individuals were genotyped for 6000 SNPs across six chromosomes. We present an illustration of a Bayesian QTL linkage analysis, as implemented in the special purpose software FlexQTL. Most importantly, we treated the number of bi-allelic QTL as a random variable and used Bayes Factors to infer plausible QTL models. We investigated the power of our analysis in relation to the number of phenotyped individuals and SNPs.
Results:
We report clear posterior evidence for 12 QTL that jointly explained 30% of the phenotypic variance, which was very close to the total of included simulation effects, when using all phenotypes and a set of 600 SNPs. Decreasing the number of phenotyped individuals from 4665 to 1665 and/or the number of SNPs in the analysis from 600 to 120 dramatically reduced the power to identify and locate QTL. Posterior estimates of genome-wide breeding values for a small set of individuals were given.
Conclusion:
We presented a successful Bayesian linkage analysis of a simulated dataset with a pedigree spanning several generations. Our analysis identified all regions that contained QTL with effects explaining more than one percent of the phenotypic variance. We showed how the results of a Bayesian QTL mapping can be used in genomic prediction.
