Genetics of global gene expression.

A new field of genetic analysis of global gene expression has emerged in recent years, driven by the realization that traditional techniques of linkage and association analysis can be applied to thousands of transcript levels measured by microarrays. Genetic dissection of transcript abundance has shed light on the architecture of quantitative traits, provided a new approach for connecting DNA sequence variation with phenotypic variation, and improved our understanding of transcriptional regulation and regulatory variation.