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Many traits in humans and other species are highly polygenic, i.e., affected by standing genetic variation at hundreds or thousands of loci. Under normal conditions, the genetic variation underlying such traits is governed by stabilizing selection, in which natural selection acts to hold the population close to an optimal phenotype.
Pleiotropy seems limited for many traits in humans since the SNP overlap, as measured by variance accounted for, between many polygenic predictors is small. Most genetic traits are polygenic in nature: controlled by many genetic variants, each of small effect. These genetic variants can reside in protein coding or non-coding regions of the genome.
Traits controlled by two or more genes are said to be polygenic traits. Polygenic means "many genes" are necessary for the organism to develop the trait. For example, at least three genes are involved in making the reddish-brown pigment in the eyes of fruit flies. Polygenic traits often show a wide range of phenotypes.
Human height is a continuous trait meaning that there is a wide range of heights. There are an estimated 50 genes that affect the height of a human. Environmental factors, like nutrition, also play a role in a human's height. Other examples of complex traits include: crop yield, plant color, and many diseases including diabetes and Parkinson's ...
A polygene is a member of a group of non-epistatic genes that interact additively to influence a phenotypic trait, thus contributing to multiple-gene inheritance (polygenic inheritance, multigenic inheritance, quantitative inheritance [1]), a type of non-Mendelian inheritance, as opposed to single-gene inheritance, which is the core notion of ...
Unlike monogenic traits, polygenic traits do not follow patterns of Mendelian inheritance (discrete categories). Instead, their phenotypes typically vary along a continuous gradient depicted by a bell curve. [8] An example of a polygenic trait is human skin color variation.
Under the Polygenic Model, for traits, like height, to be continuous in a population there must be many genes that code for the trait. Otherwise, the expression of the trait is limited by the number of possible combinations of alleles. The many genes which code for the continuous trait are also further modified by environmental conditions. [3]
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 11 January 2025. Science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms This article is about the general scientific term. For the scientific journal, see Genetics (journal). For a more accessible and less technical introduction to this topic, see Introduction to genetics. For the Meghan Trainor ...