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

本文将对树结构技术在遗传关联检测中的应用、发展和评价进行综述。评估本提案中开发的所有技术的性能将涉及识别与候选基因的等位基因变异和基因组水平上的遗传标记组合之间的显著关联。这一建议扩展了嵌套进化枝分析，这是更普遍的实现在许多领域的研究。该方法将首次在确定基因型/表型关联的背景下，在具有不同参数的受控条件下进行严格评估。该项目的结果将对生态学、进化论、发育生物学、遗传学、流行病学和医学等领域的数据分析和解释产生广泛的影响，特别是对那些寻求确定数量性状位点的研究。实现这种分析的计算机程序的制作和分发将使所有领域的研究人员，特别是那些不熟悉它所实现的技术的研究人员，都能普遍获得和使用它。也许最大的智力价值在于建立了系统发育技术，作为一种合理的方法来评估某些类型的种群数据，这些数据不需要完全解决个体关系。

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.