Gene mapping
Collaborating with biologists, we are actively involved in mapping the genes underlying animal diseases and agriculturally important traits. For example, we found that maize flowering time is controlled by more than 40 quantitative trait loci (QTLs), which collectively explained more than 80% of the genetic variation in this agriculturally important crop (Buckler et al., Science, 2009). Improving statistical methods for GWAS has allowed us to efficiently map many QTLs underlying complex traits; some of these QTLs are within 200~300 Kb of the known genes identified previously (Zhou et al. PLOS ONE, 2010 and Huang et al. Nature Genetics, 2010).