ArticleGenetics2014
Additive, epistatic, and environmental effects through the lens of expression variability QTL in a twin cohort.
Article in Genetics, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Genetic impacts on within-pair DNA methylation variance in monozygotic twins capture gene-environment interactions and cell-type effects.Genome biology · 2026Article
- Species evolution: cryptic species and phenotypic noise with a particular focus on fungal systematics.Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2025Review
- Article
- Detecting genetic effects on phenotype variability to capture gene-by-environment interactions: a systematic method comparison.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2024Review
- Gene-environment interactions and their impact on human health.Genes and immunity · 2023Review
- Variable expression quantitative trait loci analysis of breast cancer risk variants.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Mitochondrial GWAS and association of nuclear - mitochondrial epistasis with BMI in T1DM patients.BMC medical genomics · 2020Article
- Overdispersed gene expression in schizophrenia.NPJ schizophrenia · 2020Article
- Variance heterogeneity genome-wide mapping for cadmium in bread wheat reveals novel genomic loci and epistatic interactions.The plant genome · 2020Article
- Using regulatory variants to detect gene-gene interactions identifies networks of genes linked to cell immortalisation.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Genetic Effects on Dispersion in Urinary Albumin and Creatinine in Three House Mouse (G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2019Article
- QTL Mapping on a Background of Variance Heterogeneity.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2018Article
- Combined genetic influence of the nicotinic receptor gene cluster CHRNA5/A3/B4 on nicotine dependence.BMC genomics · 2018Article
- Genotypic variability-based genome-wide association study identifies non-additive loci HLA-C and IL12B for psoriasis.Journal of human genetics · 2018Article
- Analysis of Gene Expression Variance in Schizophrenia Using Structural Equation Modeling.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2018Article
- A sibling method for identifying vQTLs.PloS one · 2018Article
- Current Challenges and New Opportunities for Gene-Environment Interaction Studies of Complex Diseases.American journal of epidemiology · 2017Article
- veqtl-mapper: variance association mapping for molecular phenotypes.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2017Article
- Genotypic variability based association identifies novel non-additive loci DHCR7 and IRF4 in sero-negative rheumatoid arthritis.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Epistasis and destabilizing mutations shape gene expression variability in humans via distinct modes of action.Human molecular genetics · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The expression of a gene can vary across individuals in the general population, as well as between monozygotic twins. This variable expression is assumed to be due to the influence of both genetic and nongenetic factors. Yet little evidence supporting this assumption has been obtained from empirical data. In this study, we used expression data from a large twin cohort to investigate the influences of genetic and nongenetic factors on variable gene expression. We focused on a set of expression variability QTL (evQTL)--i.e., genetic loci associated with the variance, as opposed to the mean, of gene expression. We identified evQTL for 99, 56, and 79 genes in lymphoblastoid cell lines, skin, and fat, respectively. The differences in gene expression, measured by the relative mean difference (RMD), tended to be larger between pairs of dizygotic (DZ) twins than between pairs of monozygotic (MZ) twins, showing that genetic background influenced the expression variability. Furthermore, a more profound RMD was observed between pairs of MZ twins whose genotypes were associated with greater expression variability than the RMD found between pairs of MZ twins whose genotypes were associated with smaller expression variability. This suggests that nongenetic (e.g., environmental) factors contribute to the variable expression. Lastly, we demonstrated that the formation of evQTL is likely due to partial linkages between eQTL SNPs that are additively associated with the mean of gene expression; in most cases, no epistatic effect is involved. Our findings have implications for understanding divergent sources of gene expression variability.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.