Finally, TATES facilitates the study of the genetic overlap between phenotypes in different domains, for example medical and psychiatric disorders that show high comorbidity, and yet are generally studied separately. Studying behavioural profiles [29] rather than single phenotypes, and phenotypes spanning multiple levels of organisation (e.g., behaviour, morphology, physiology), advances analysis of the “phenome” (the phenotype as a whole, on an organism-wide scale) [30]. Here, TATES is a useful tool, as it is hypothesis- and model-free, and deals with the high phenotypic dimensionality by combining the univariate analyses while correcting for the relatedness between phenomic dimensions. Furthermore, in a highly dimensional phenotypic context, the fact that one does not need to know the underlying data-generating model, or the mechanism causing comorbidity/association between the individual phenotypes in the analysis, is an attractive feature of TATES.
