We have recently developed a statistical method which relates the differences in traits across people to the patterns of genetic variants that have been inherited from each parent.The goal of this approach is to identify traits in which maternal (paternal) inheritance has as a subtle effect at many locations in the genome, and, when this occurs, to estimate the overall strength of this effect.

To evaluate the usefulness of this method, we hope to apply it to several traits. Most importantly, we plan to apply it to age at menarche, a trait for which there is some evidence that maternal inheritance has as a subtle effect at many locations in the genome. Additionally, we plan to apply the method to other traits which we have experience studying and which are well characterised in the literature, so that we can make informed comparisons between results from our method and from published work. For these comparisons, we plan to use traits related to bone health, as well as measurements of reaction time.