“Arte et Labore”—A Blackburn Rovers fan's legacy in human complex trait genetics

Abstract

Through his own research contributions on the modelling and genetic analysis of quantitative traits and through his former students and postdocs, Robin Thompson has indirectly left a major legacy in human genetics. In this short note, we highlight examples of the long‐lasting relevance and impact of Robin's work in human genetics. A lone early study of marker‐assisted selection developed many of the tools and approaches later exploited (often after reinvention) by the human genetics community in GWAS studies and for prediction. Furthermore, a particularly clear example of the pervasive impact of Robin's work is that REML has become the default method to estimate variance components and that genetic predictions exploiting linkage disequilibrium in the population are starting to become used in precision medicine applications.

Average semivariance yields accurate estimates of the fraction of marker-associated genetic variance and heritability in complex trait analyses

“…The marker-assisted selection (MAS) approach envisioned by Lande and Thompson (1990) was ultimately supplanted by genomic selection, where breeding values are estimated by whole-genome regression (WGR) methods in populations genotyped with a dense genome-wide framework of DNA markers (Meuwissen et al . 2001; VanRaden 2008; Hill 2012, 2014; Visscher et al . 2019).…”