Читать книгу Principles of Plant Genetics and Breeding - George Acquaah - Страница 144

Most traits encountered in plant breeding are quantitatively inherited. Many genes control such traits, each contributing a small effect to the overall phenotypic expression of a trait. Variation in quantitative trait expression is without natural discontinuities (i.e. the variation is continuous). The traits that exhibit continuous variations are also called metric traits. Any attempt to classify such traits into distinct groups is only arbitrary. For example, height is a quantitative trait. If plants are grouped into tall versus short plants, one could find relatively tall plants in the short group and similarly short plants in the tall group.