A Cladistic Analysis of Phenotypic Associations with Haplotypes Inferred from Restriction Endonuclease Mapping. I. Basic Theory and an Analysis of Alcohol Dehydrogenase Activity in Drosophila

Abstract

Because some genes have been cloned that have a known biochemical or physiological function, genetic variation can be measured in a population at loci that may directly influence a phenotype of interest. With this measured genotype approach, specific alleles or haplotypes in the probed DNA region can be assigned phenotypic effects. In this paper we address several problems encountered in implementing the measured genotype approach with restriction site data. A number of analytical problems arise in part as a consequence of the linkage disequilibrium that is commonly encountered when dealing with small DNA regions: 1) different restriction site polymorphisms are not statistically independent, 2) the sites being measured are not likely to be the direct cause of the associated phenotypic effects, 3) haplotype classes may be phenotypically heterogeneous, and 4) the sites that are most strongly associated with phenotypic effects are not necessarily the most closely linked to the actual genetic cause of the effects. When recombination and gene conversion are rare, the primary cause of linkage disequilibrium is history (mutational origin, genetic drift, hitchhiking, etc.). We deal with historical association directly by producing a cladogram that partially reconstructs the evolutionary history of the present-day haplotype variability. The cladogram defines a nested analysis of variance that simultaneously detects phenotypic effects, localizes the effects within the cladogram, and identifies haplotypes that are potentially heterogeneous in their phenotypic associations. The power of this approach is illustrated by an analysis of the associations between alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) activity and restriction site variability in a 13-kb fragment surrounding the ADH locus in Drosophila melanogaster.