A few months ago I gave a talk at the ChickenStress Genomics and Bioinformatics Workshop about genetic mapping of traits and gene expression.

ChickenStress is a European training network of researchers who study stress in chickens, as you might expect. It brings together people who work with (according to the work package names) environmental factors, early life experiences and genetics. The network is centered on a group of projects by early stage researchers — by the way, I think that’s a really good way to describe the work of a PhD student — and organises activities like this workshop.

I was asked to talk about our work from my PhD on gene expression and behaviour in the chicken (Johnsson & al. 2018, Johnsson & al. 2016), concentrating on concepts and methods rather than results. If I have any recurring readers, they will already know that brief is exactly what I like to do. I talked about the basis of genetic mapping of traits and gene expression, what data one needs to do it, and gave a quick demo for a flavour of an analysis workflow (linear mixed model genome-wide association in GEMMA).

Here are slides, and the git repository of the demo: