Heritability estimates from genome wide relatedness matrices in wild populations: application to a passerine, using a small sample size

Genomic developments have empowered the investigation of heritability in wild populations directly from genome wide relatedness matrices (GRM). Such GRM based approaches can in particular be used to improve or substitute approaches based on social pedigree (PED-social). However, measuring heritability from GRM in the wild has not been widely applied yet, especially using small samples and in non-model species. Here, we estimated heritability for four quantitative traits (tarsus length, wing length, bill length and body mass), using PED-social and a pedigree corrected by genetic data (PED-corrected) and GRM from a small sample (n = 494) of blue tits from natural populations in Corsica genotyped at nearly 50,000 filtered SNPs derived from RAD-seq. We also measured genetic correlations among traits and we performed chromosome partitioning. Heritability estimates were slightly higher when using GRM compared to PED-social, and PED-corrected yielded intermediate values, suggesting a minor und...

基因组学的发展使得我们能够直接通过全基因组亲缘关系矩阵（genome wide relatedness matrices, GRM）开展野生种群的遗传力研究。这类基于GRM的分析方法，可用于优化或替代基于社会谱系（PED-social）的研究手段。然而，在野生种群中借助GRM估算遗传力的应用仍未得到广泛普及，尤其是在样本量有限的研究以及非模式生物类群中。本研究针对4个数量性状（跗跖长度、翅长、喙长与体质量），分别采用社会谱系（PED-social）、经遗传数据校正的谱系（PED-corrected）以及GRM进行遗传力估算；所用样本为采自科西嘉岛自然种群的494只蓝山雀，其基因型通过基于RAD-seq技术得到的近5万个过滤后的单核苷酸多态性（single nucleotide polymorphism, SNPs）位点进行分型。本研究同时测定了各性状间的遗传相关，并开展了染色体分区分析。结果显示，基于GRM的遗传力估算值略高于PED-social方法，而PED-corrected方法得到的估算值介于二者之间，这暗示存在轻微的……