Taking QTL mapping in multiparental populations to the next dimension: searching for epistasis

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• Dr Emma Huang, CSIRO, Australia
• Tuesday 10 June 2014, 16:00-17:00
• Boardroom of The Sainsbury Laboratory (Bateman Street).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Helen Mawdsley.

Multiparental populations have now been developed in several species with the aim of facilitating the detection of novel gene-trait associations. Most studies have focused on how best to capitalize on the increased diversity and precision of such populations through the detection of QTL main effects. However, the promise of multiparental populations, in large part, lies in their creation of novel combinations of alleles which may lead to new insights regarding epistatic interactions.

Detection of epistatic effects is in part a computational issue – an exhaustive scan of pairwise comparisons may be several orders of magnitude more intensive than a one-dimensional scan. It is further complicated by statistical issues such as multicollinearity, power, and the most appropriate choice of model for individual founder effects. I will discuss different approaches to epistatic scans in multiparental populations and their feasibility at a genomewide scale, with examples from simulated data and application to data from the Arabidopsis MAGIC population. In particular, the ability to harness the power of parallel computing through Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) shows great promise for exhaustive interaction searches.

This talk is part of the Sainsbury Laboratory Seminars series.

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