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Editorial
. 2010 Aug;56(2):251-4.
doi: 10.1053/j.ajkd.2010.05.003.

A lesson from the Zuni Indians: heritability in perspective

Madhumathi Rao, Inga Peter, Thomas A Trikalinos
Editorial

A lesson from the Zuni Indians: heritability in perspective

Madhumathi Rao et al. Am J Kidney Dis. 2010 Aug.
No abstract available

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Heritability metrics Heritability is a concept that summarizes how much of the variation in a trait is due to variation in genetic factors. Resemblance between parents and offspring or within siblings is an intuitive illustration of the concept of heritability. Heritability should be distinguished from familiality that only implies sharing of traits within a family for any reason (e.g., obesity as result of high energy diet, or lung cancer as result of smoking). Traits are heritable only if the similarity arises from shared genotypes. We refer to the “narrow sense heritability” or h2, as the ratio of the additive genetic variance to the total phenotypic variance. Resemblance between relatives is mostly driven by additive genetic variance, so narrow sense heritability tells us how well a parent's phenotypic value will predict the offspring value (9). When all genetic influences are taken into account, including additive and non-additive (dominance and interactive or epistatic) effects, their ratio with total phenotypic variance yields the “broad sense heritability” or H2 (10, 11). This parameter tells us what proportion of the phenotypic variation is due to the genotypes of the individuals of the population. It does not address how similar the phenotype of a child will be to its parent.
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