Just as phenotypic plasticity can evolve when developing individuals get informational cues about their future adult environment, deterministic maternal effects, where offspring trait values depend on the maternal environment, can evolve when mothers gain reliable information about the environments their offspring will face. Randomizing maternal effects (a type of diversifying bet hedging), whe...

A total of 11,815 weight records from 23,94 Japanese Black calves was used to estimate direct, maternal, direct permanent environmental, and maternal permanent environmental effects on growth from birth to 356 d of age. The data were collected from a herd of Japanese Black cattle in Shiroshi city, Miyagi prefecture, Japan. A random regression model, including parity of dam and year-season of ca...

in this study records of 15723, 12108 and 5236 zel sheep for birth weight (bw), weaning weight (ww) and 6-month weight (6mw) traits were used. data has been collected by the jahad-e-keshavarzi organization of province of mazandaran during 1994-2009. the heritability of direct and maternal of growth traits was estimated using the univariate analysis with restricted maximum likelihood (reml). in ...

1. Genetic and environmental maternal effects can play an important role in the evolutionary dynamics of a population: they may have a substantial impact on the rate and direction of genetic change in response to selection, and they may generate immediate phenotypic change via phenotypic plasticity. Because of this potential to generate rapid phenotypic change in a population, maternal effects ...

Postnatal maternal separation increases hypothalamic corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) gene expression and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and behavioral responses to stress. We report here that environmental enrichment during the peripubertal period completely reverses the effects of maternal separation on both HPA and behavioral responses to stress, with no effect on CRF mRNA expressi...

a total of 2000 records of egg quality of 746 birds and body weight data from 17th generation of fars native fowl breeding station were used to estimate the genetic parameters of egg quality and body weight traits. six univariate animal models with different random effects were fitted for each trait. a model with direct additive genetic and maternal permanent environmental effects was the most ...

Variance components for birth, weaning, yearling and final weight in Australian Hereford, Angus and Zebu Cross cattle were estimated by Restricted Maximum Likelihood. Six different animal models were fitted for each trait and breed, ranging from a simple model with animals as the only random effect to the most comprehensive model allowing for both genetic and environmental maternal effects and ...

BACKGROUND Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has both genetic and environmental origins, including potentially maternal effects. Maternal effects describe the association of one or more maternal phenotypes with liability to ASD in progeny that are independent of maternally transmitted risk alleles. While maternal effects could play an important role, consistent with association to maternal traits ...

Variance components were estimated for maturing age, first litter size, and animal size in Finnish minks. The fitted animal models had direct genetic and maternal genetic effects, litter effects, and maternal environmental effects. Multivariate analysis was performed to determine covariances between the traits. Maternal effects represented a significant source of phenotypic variance in the matu...