RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Whole-genome modeling accurately predicts quantitative traits, as revealed in plants JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 030395 DO 10.1101/030395 A1 Laurent Gentzbittel A1 Cécile Ben A1 Mélanie Mazurier A1 Min-Gyoung Shin A1 Martin Triska A1 Martina Rickauer A1 Yuri Nikolsky A1 Paul Marjoram A1 Sergey Nuzhdin A1 Tatiana V. Tatarinova YR 2016 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/02/04/030395.abstract AB Many adaptive events in natural populations, as well as response to artificial selection, are caused by polygenic action. Under selective pressure, the adaptive traits can quickly respond via small allele frequency shifts spread across numerous loci. We hypothesize that a large proportion of current phenotypic variation between individuals may be best explained by population admixture.We thus consider the complete, genome-wide universe of genetic variability, spread across several ancestral populations originally separated. We experimentally confirmed this hypothesis by predicting the differences in quantitative disease resistance levels among accessions in the wild legume Medicago truncatula. We discovered also that variation in genome admixture proportion explains most of phenotypic variation for several quantitative functional traits, but not for symbiotic nitrogen fixation. We shown that positive selection at the species level might not explain current, rapid adaptation.These findings prove the infinitesimal model as a mechanism for adaptation of quantitative phenotypes. Our study produced the first evidence that the whole-genome modeling of DNA variants is the best approach to describe an inherited quantitative trait in a higher eukaryote organism and proved the high potential of admixture-based analyses. This insight contribute to the understanding of polygenic adaptation, and can accelerate plant and animal breeding, and biomedicine research programs.