A trait must genetically correlate with fitness in order to evolve in response to natural selection, but theory suggests that strong directional selection should erode additive genetic variance in fitness and limit future evolutionary potential. Balancing selection has been proposed as a mechanism that could maintain genetic variance if fitness components trade off with one another and has been...

Direct additive and maternal genetic effects on birth and weaning weight of Chios lambs were investigated. The data originated from the Agricultural Research Station of Chalkidiki and comprised 7318 lambs, raised over the period from 1977 to 1992. Variance components were estimated using restricted maximum likelihood, fitting six different animal models, by 2 including or excluding maternal eff...

Human memory is a highly heritable polygenic trait with complex inheritance patterns. To study the genetics of memory and memory-related diseases, hippocampal functioning has served as an intermediate phenotype. The importance of investigating gene-gene effects on complex phenotypes has been emphasized, but most imaging studies still focus on single polymorphisms. APOE ε4 and BDNF Met, two of t...

The genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) are found in all vertebrates and are an important component of individual fitness through their role in disease and pathogen resistance. These genes are among the most polymorphic in genomes and the mechanism that maintains the diversity has been actively debated with arguments for natural selection centering on either additive or nonaddit...

Cryptic genetic variation (CGV) refers to genetic variants whose effects are buffered in most conditions but manifest phenotypically upon specific genetic and environmental perturbations. Despite having a central role in adaptation, contribution of CGV to regulation of quantitative traits is unclear. Instead, a relatively simplistic architecture of additive genetic loci is known to regulate phe...

the objective of the present study was to estimate heritability values for some performance and egg quality traits of native fowl in isfahan breeding center using reml and bayesian approaches. the records were about 51521 and 975 for performance and egg quality traits, respectively. at the first step, variance components were estimated for body weight at hatch (bw0), body weight at 8 weeks of a...

Dispersion parameters for the number of piglets born alive were estimated using a repeatability and random regression model. Six sow breeds/lines were included in the analysis: Swedish Landrace, Large White and both crossbred lines between them, German Landrace and their cross with Large White. Fixed part of the model included sow genotype, mating season as month-year interaction, parity and we...

One hundred upland cotton germplasm accessions were evaluated for eight traits to evaluate the per se performance, genetic variability, heritability, advance as a cent of mean, correlation and path analysis. The estimation variability indicated that number monopodia plant had high GCV PCV. High heritability along with GAM was  found in height, internode length, plant, sympodia bolls seed y...

The aim of this study was to estimate the genetic parameters for preweaning traits and their relationship with reproductive, productive and morphological traits in alpacas. The data were collected from 2001 to 2015 in the Pacomarca experimental farm. The data set contained data from 4330 females and 3788 males corresponding to 6396 and 1722 animals for Huacaya and Suri variants, respectively. T...

Epistasis effects (gene interactions) have been increasingly recognized as important genetic factors underlying complex traits. The existence of a large number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provides opportunities and challenges to screen DNA variations affecting complex traits using a candidate gene analysis. In this article, four types of epistasis effects of two candidate gene SNP...