182 Practice Problems: Quantitative Genetics

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since 26 Feb 1996

1. If the slope of a parent-offspring regression is 0.25, what is the heritability h²?

2. If the slope of a midparent-offspring regression is 0.75, what is the heritability h²?

3. If h² = 0.3, the population mean is 10, and the value of a parent is 15, what is the expected mean of an offspring from this parent?

4. If h² = 0.4, the population mean is 16, and the value of both parents are mother = 12, father = 17.
   • What is the midparental value?
   • What is the expected mean of an offspring from these parents?

5. If the mean of a group of selected parents is 10 units above the population mean, while the mean value of their offspring is 3 units above the original population mean, what is the heritability h²?

6. Suppose 5 locus underlie a character of interest and that each capital letter allele at each locus adds value one to the character (so that genotype aabbccddee has value 0 while AABBCCDDEE has value 10). Suppose Freq(A) = Freq(B) = ... = Freq(E) and we assume H-W for both parts a) & b).
   • If Freq(A) = 0.7, what is the probability of an individual with genotype aabbccddee ?
   • Suppose now that selection changes the allele frequencies to Freq(A) = 0.1, now what is the probability of an individual with genotype aabbccddee ?

7. If the correlation between dizygotic twins for weight is 0.5, while the correlation between monozygotic twins is 0.75, what is the heritability of weight?

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