The objectives of this study were to compare (co)variance parameter estimates among subsets of data that were pooled from herds with high, medium, or low individual herd heritability estimates and to compare individual herd heritability estimates to REML heritability estimates for pooled data sets. A regression model was applied to milk yield, fat yield, protein yield, and somatic cell score (S...

OBJECTIVE To develop a ridge penalized principal-components approach based on heritability that can be applied to high-dimensional family data. METHODS The first principal component of heritability for a trait constellation is defined as a linear combination of traits that maximizes the heritability, which is equivalent to maximize the family-specific variation relative to the subject-specifi...

The genetic contribution of blood pressure and heart rate (HR) varied widely between studies. Demographic factors such as ethnicity, age and/or sex might explain some of the heterogeneity. We performed a systematic review focusing on four phenotypes: systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), HR and pulse pressure (PP). Meta-regression was conducted to analyze potential fact...

We present estimates of heritability for carcass traits of cattle published in the scientific literature. Seventy-two papers published from 1962 to 2004, which reported estimates of heritability for carcass traits, were reviewed. The unweighted means of estimates of heritability for 14 carcass traits by slaughter end point (age, weight, and fat depth) were calculated. Among the three end points...

"Missing heritability" in genome wide association studies, the failure to account for a considerable fraction of heritability by the variants detected, is a current puzzle in human genetics. For solving this puzzle the involvement of genetic variants like rare single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and copy number variations (CNVs) has been proposed. Many papers have published estimating the he...