Research Article On the Estimation of Heritability with Family-Based and

Copyright © 2015 Youngdoe Kim et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a family-based sample, the phenotypic variance-covariance matrix can be parameterized to include the variance of a polygenic effect that has then been estimated using a variance component analysis. However, with the advent of large-scale genomic data, the genetic relationship matrix (GRM) can be estimated and can be utilized to parameterize the variance of a polygenic effect for population-based samples. Therefore narrow sense heritability, which is both population and trait specific, can be estimated with both population- and family-based samples. In this study we estimate heritability from both family-based and population-based samples, collected in Korea, and the heritability estimates from the pooled samples were, for height, 0.60; body mass inde