Quantitative genetics
the study of the inheritance of continuously measured traits
Quantitative genetics is the study of quantitative traits, which are phenotypes that vary continuously—such as height or mass—as opposed to phenotypes and gene-products that are discretely identifiable—such as eye-colour, or the presence of a particular biochemical.
While population genetics can focus on particular genes and their subsequent metabolic products, quantitative genetics focuses more on the outward phenotypes, and makes only summaries of the underlying genetics. Both of these branches of genetics use the frequencies of different alleles of a gene in breeding populations (gamodemes), and combine them with concepts from simple Mendelian inheritance to analyze inheritance patterns across generations and descendant lines.
Due to the continuous distribution of phenotypic values, quantitative genetics must employ many other statistical methods (such as the effect size, the mean and the variance) to link phenotypes (attributes) to genotypes. Some phenotypes may be analyzed either as discrete categories or as continuous phenotypes, depending on the definition of cut-off points, or on the metric used to quantify them. Mendel himself had to discuss this matter in his famous paper, especially with respect to his peas' attribute tall/dwarf, which actually was derived by adding a cut-off point to "length of stem". Analysis of quantitative trait loci, or QTLs, is a more recent addition to quantitative genetics, linking it more directly to molecular genetics.
Gene effects
In diploid organisms, the average genotypic "value" (locus value) may be defined by the allele "effect" together with a dominance effect, and also by how genes interact with genes at other loci (epistasis). The founder of quantitative genetics - Sir Ronald Fisher - perceived much of this when he proposed the first mathematics of this branch of genetics.
Being a statistician, he defined the gene effects as deviations from a central value—enabling the use of statistical concepts such as mean and variance, which use this idea.
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