TY - JOUR AB - Across-nation differences in the mean values for complex traits are common1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, but the reasons for these differences are unknown. Here we find that many independent loci contribute to population genetic differences in height and body mass index (BMI) in 9,416 individuals across 14 European countries. Using discovery data on over 250,000 individuals and unbiased effect size estimates from 17,500 sibling pairs, we estimate that 24% (95% credible interval (CI) = 9%, 41%) and 8% (95% CI = 4%, 16%) of the captured additive genetic variance for height and BMI, respectively, reflect population genetic differences. Population genetic divergence differed significantly from that in a null model (height, P < 3.94 × 10−8; BMI, P < 5.95 × 10−4), and we find an among-population genetic correlation for tall and slender individuals (r = −0.80, 95% CI = −0.95, −0.60), consistent with correlated selection for both phenotypes. Observed differences in height among populations reflected the predicted genetic means (r = 0.51; P < 0.001), but environmental differences across Europe masked genetic differentiation for BMI (P < 0.58). AU - Robinson, Matthew Richard AU - Hemani, Gibran AU - Medina-Gomez, Carolina AU - Mezzavilla, Massimo AU - Esko, Tonu AU - Shakhbazov, Konstantin AU - Powell, Joseph E AU - Vinkhuyzen, Anna AU - Berndt, Sonja I AU - Gustafsson, Stefan AU - Justice, Anne E AU - Kahali, Bratati AU - Locke, Adam E AU - Pers, Tune H AU - Vedantam, Sailaja AU - Wood, Andrew R AU - van Rheenen, Wouter AU - Andreassen, Ole A AU - Gasparini, Paolo AU - Metspalu, Andres AU - Berg, Leonard H van den AU - Veldink, Jan H AU - Rivadeneira, Fernando AU - Werge, Thomas M AU - Abecasis, Goncalo R AU - Boomsma, Dorret I AU - Chasman, Daniel I AU - de Geus, Eco J C AU - Frayling, Timothy M AU - Hirschhorn, Joel N AU - Hottenga, Jouke Jan AU - Ingelsson, Erik AU - Loos, Ruth J F AU - Magnusson, Patrik K E AU - Martin, Nicholas G AU - Montgomery, Grant W AU - North, Kari E AU - Pedersen, Nancy L AU - Spector, Timothy D AU - Speliotes, Elizabeth K AU - Goddard, Michael E AU - Yang, Jian AU - Visscher, Peter M ID - 7742 IS - 11 JF - Nature Genetics SN - 1061-4036 TI - Population genetic differentiation of height and body mass index across Europe VL - 47 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Phenotypes expressed in a social context are not only a function of the individual, but can also be shaped by the phenotypes of social partners. These social effects may play a major role in the evolution of cooperative breeding if social partners differ in the quality of care they provide and if individual carers adjust their effort in relation to that of other carers. When applying social effects models to wild study systems, it is also important to explore sources of individual plasticity that could masquerade as social effects. We studied offspring provisioning rates of parents and helpers in a wild population of long-tailed tits Aegithalos caudatus using a quantitative genetic framework to identify these social effects and partition them into genetic, permanent environment and current environment components. Controlling for other effects, individuals were consistent in their provisioning effort at a given nest, but adjusted their effort based on who was in their social group, indicating the presence of social effects. However, these social effects differed between years and social contexts, indicating a current environment effect, rather than indicating a genetic or permanent environment effect. While this study reveals the importance of examining environmental and genetic sources of social effects, the framework we present is entirely general, enabling a greater understanding of potentially important social effects within any ecological population. AU - Adams, Mark James AU - Robinson, Matthew Richard AU - Mannarelli, Maria-Elena AU - Hatchwell, Ben J. ID - 7741 IS - 1810 JF - Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences SN - 0962-8452 TI - Social genetic and social environment effects on parental and helper care in a cooperatively breeding bird VL - 282 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Currently, there is much debate on the genetic architecture of quantitative traits in wild populations. Is trait variation influenced by many genes of small effect or by a few genes of major effect? Where is additive genetic variation located in the genome? Do the same loci cause similar phenotypic variation in different populations? Great tits (Parus major) have been studied extensively in long‐term studies across Europe and consequently are considered an ecological ‘model organism’. Recently, genomic resources have been developed for the great tit, including a custom SNP chip and genetic linkage map. In this study, we used a suite of approaches to investigate the genetic architecture of eight quantitative traits in two long‐term study populations of great tits—one in the Netherlands and the other in the United Kingdom. Overall, we found little evidence for the presence of genes of large effects in either population. Instead, traits appeared to be influenced by many genes of small effect, with conservative estimates of the number of contributing loci ranging from 31 to 310. Despite concordance between population‐specific heritabilities, we found no evidence for the presence of loci having similar effects in both populations. While population‐specific genetic architectures are possible, an undetected shared architecture cannot be rejected because of limited power to map loci of small and moderate effects. This study is one of few examples of genetic architecture analysis in replicated wild populations and highlights some of the challenges and limitations researchers will face when attempting similar molecular quantitative genetic studies in free‐living populations. AU - Santure, Anna W. AU - Poissant, Jocelyn AU - De Cauwer, Isabelle AU - van Oers, Kees AU - Robinson, Matthew Richard AU - Quinn, John L. AU - Groenen, Martien A. M. AU - Visser, Marcel E. AU - Sheldon, Ben C. AU - Slate, Jon ID - 7739 JF - Molecular Ecology SN - 0962-1083 TI - Replicated analysis of the genetic architecture of quantitative traits in two wild great tit populations VL - 24 ER - TY - CONF AB - High-performance concurrent priority queues are essential for applications such as task scheduling and discrete event simulation. Unfortunately, even the best performing implementations do not scale past a number of threads in the single digits. This is because of the sequential bottleneck in accessing the elements at the head of the queue in order to perform a DeleteMin operation. In this paper, we present the SprayList, a scalable priority queue with relaxed ordering semantics. Starting from a non-blocking SkipList, the main innovation behind our design is that the DeleteMin operations avoid a sequential bottleneck by "spraying" themselves onto the head of the SkipList list in a coordinated fashion. The spraying is implemented using a carefully designed random walk, so that DeleteMin returns an element among the first O(plog3p) in the list, with high probability, where p is the number of threads. We prove that the running time of a DeleteMin operation is O(log3p), with high probability, independent of the size of the list. Our experiments show that the relaxed semantics allow the data structure to scale for high thread counts, comparable to a classic unordered SkipList. Furthermore, we observe that, for reasonably parallel workloads, the scalability benefits of relaxation considerably outweigh the additional work due to out-of-order execution. AU - Alistarh, Dan-Adrian AU - Kopinsky, Justin AU - Li, Jerry AU - Shavit, Nir ID - 776 TI - The SprayList: A scalable relaxed priority queue VL - 2015-January ER - TY - JOUR AB - We introduce a principle unique to disordered solids wherein the contribution of any bond to one global perturbation is uncorrelated with its contribution to another. Coupled with sufficient variability in the contributions of different bonds, this “independent bond-level response” paves the way for the design of real materials with unusual and exquisitely tuned properties. To illustrate this, we choose two global perturbations: compression and shear. By applying a bond removal procedure that is both simple and experimentally relevant to remove a very small fraction of bonds, we can drive disordered spring networks to both the incompressible and completely auxetic limits of mechanical behavior. AU - Goodrich, Carl Peter AU - Liu, Andrea J. AU - Nagel, Sidney R. ID - 7765 IS - 22 JF - Physical Review Letters SN - 0031-9007 TI - The principle of independent bond-level response: Tuning by pruning to exploit disorder for global behavior VL - 114 ER -