Hervé Perdry, University of Paris-Saclay

We will review briefly the polygenic model in which both heritability and genomic trait prediction are grounded. A special attention will be dedicated to the shortcomings of this model, and to their consequences on the interpretation of heritability estimates and genomic prediction scores.  In a second time, we will give an overview of an ongoing work with A. Herzig and A. Saint Pierre, in which we explore the consequences of assortative mating and vertical cultural transmission. Assortative mating occurs when individuals chose mates with similar traits; vertical cultural or environmental transmission occurs when the offspring environment is correlated with the parental environment. We show that when both phenomena occur together, they induce a gene-environment correlation at the population level. This will in turn impact heritability estimates and prediction scores.