Correcting the bias in estimation of genetic variances contributed by individual QTL.

In addition to locating chromosomal positions of quantitative trait loci (QTL), estimating the sizes of identified QTL is also an important component in QTL mapping. The size of a QTL is usually measured by the proportion of the phenotypic variance contributed by the QTL. However, the genetic variance may be overestimated in a small line crossing experiment. In this study, we investigate this bias and develop a simple method to correct the bias. The bias correction, however, requires the error of the estimated genetic effect, which is not trivial if the genetic effect is estimated using the Expectation and Maximization (EM) algorithm. Therefore, we also develop a simple method to estimate the standard error of the estimated genetic effect, which is subsequently used to correct the bias in the variance estimate.