DISSERTATION RESEARCH: The Use of Cladistic Techniques to Identify the Genetic Determinants of Phenotypes

本课程将探讨应用、发展及评估树状建构技术，以侦测遗传关联。对本提案中开发的所有技术的性能进行评估将涉及鉴定性状与候选基因的等位基因变体以及与基因组水平遗传标记组合的显着关联。该建议扩展了嵌套分支分析，这在许多研究领域中更常见。在确定基因型/表型关联的背景下，将首次在控制条件下使用不同参数对这种方法进行严格评估。该项目的结果将对生态学、进化、发育生物学、遗传学、流行病学和医学领域的数据分析和解释产生广泛的影响，特别是对那些希望确定数量性状基因座的研究。实现这种分析的计算机程序的生产和分配将使其普遍适用于所有领域的研究人员，特别是那些不熟悉它实现的技术的人。也许最大的智力价值是建立系统发育技术作为一种合理的方法来评估某些类型的人口数据，不需要完全解决的个人关系。

The application, development and evaluation of tree building techniques, for thedetection of genetic associations will be examined. Evaluation of the performance of alltechniques developed in this proposal will involve both the identification of significantassociations of a trait with allelic variants of candidate genes and with combinations ofgenetic markers at a genomic level. This proposal expands on nested clade analysis,which is being more commonly implemented in many fields of research. This approachwill be critically evaluated under controlled conditions with varying parameters for thefirst time in the context of identifying genotype/phenotype associations. The results ofthis project will have broad implications on data analysis and interpretation in the fieldsof ecology, evolution, developmental biology, genetics, epidemiology and medicine,especially for those studies looking to identify quantitative trait loci. The production anddistribution of a computer program implementing this analysis will make it universallyavailable and accessible to researchers in all fields, especially those who are not familiarwith the techniques that it implements. Perhaps the greatest intellectual merit is in theestablishment of phylogenetic techniques as a reasonable method to evaluate certaintypes of population data that do not require completely resolved individual relationships.