Simulations with cis alleles sampled from a normal distribution with Vg(cis) specified.

The color coding (green for r2, blue for [a], pink for HE) identifies the standard deviation among replicate simulations for each model for the non-zero genetic parameters in each simulation case. Since the estimators are (nearly) unbiased, the standard deviation estimates the root mean square error. For cis genetic effects, the error is smaller for blue than green and both are much smaller than pink. For trans genetic effects, the error is the same for green and blue (the estimators are the same) but again much smaller than for pink. (XLSX)