Heritability and genetic covariation of sensitivity to PROP, SOA, quinine HCl, and caffeine - PubMed (original) (raw)

Heritability and genetic covariation of sensitivity to PROP, SOA, quinine HCl, and caffeine

Jonathan L Hansen et al. Chem Senses. 2006 Jun.

Abstract

The perceived bitterness intensity for bitter solutions of propylthiouracil (PROP), sucrose octa-acetate (SOA), quinine HCl and caffeine were examined in a genetically informative sample of 392 females and 313 males (mean age of 17.8 +/- 3.1 years), including 62 monozygotic and 131 dizygotic twin pairs and 237 sib pairs. Broad-sense heritabilities were estimated at 0.72, 0.28, 0.34, and 0.30 for PROP, SOA, quinine, and caffeine, respectively, for perceived intensity measures. Modeling showed 1) a group factor which explained a large amount of the genetic variation in SOA, quinine, and caffeine (22-28% phenotypic variation), 2) a factor responsible for all the genetic variation in PROP (72% phenotypic variation), which only accounted for 1% and 2% of the phenotypic variation in SOA and caffeine, respectively, and 3) a modest specific genetic factor for quinine (12% phenotypic variation). Unique environmental influences for all four compounds were due to a single factor responsible for 7-22% of phenotypic variation. The results suggest that the perception of PROP and the perception of SOA, quinine, and caffeine are influenced by two distinct sets of genes.

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Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

Standardized path diagram depicting the additive genetic (A) and unique environmental (E) variation in perceived intensity of PROP, SOA, quinine, and caffeine solutions and covariance between measures. U represents the test unreliability of each compound. Standardized path coefficients (which should be squared to get percentage of variance accounted for) are shown, with 95% confidence intervals in parentheses.

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