Joint QTL mapping reveals patterns of pleiotropy across structured environments in budding yeast

Joint QTL mapping in budding yeast links pleiotropic genetic architectures across 101 hub-and-perturbation phenotypes to environmental structure, revealing complex variant interactions.

• Why it matters: Prior QTL work mostly analyzes traits one at a time, leaving how genotype–phenotype maps jointly shape many related phenotypes across structured environments unclear.
• What they did: Using bulk assays, they measured competitive fitness for 100,000 individuals from a budding yeast QTL panel across 101 related phenotypes, then applied a forward search to jointly infer shared genetic bases.
• The result: Pleiotropy patterns are shaped by environmental relationships and functional variant information, implying high-throughput QTL mapping can uncover biologically meaningful genetic interactions that vary by related environmental context.

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