The objective of the present study was to estimate genetic parameters for body weight at different ages in Arabi sheep using data collected from 1999 to 2009. Investigated traits consisted of birth weight (N = 2776), weaning weight (N = 2002) and weight at six months of age (N = 1885). The data were analyzed using restricted maximum likelihood analysis, by fitting univariate and multivaria...

(Co)variance components for final score and 15 linear types traits of Jersey cows were estimated by multitrait REML using multiple diagonalization and a repeatability model with 34,999 records of 22,354 cows. Multiple diagonalization gave relative off-diagonals (ratio of squared off-diagonals to the product of diagonals) of < 0.1%. Heritabilities and repeatabilities, respectively, were estimate...

The overall twinning rate was shown to increase from .6% in the first parity to 4.0% in the sixth parity, and a positive phenotypic trend for twinning rate was observed during the time period considered (1978 to 1995). The distribution of bulls according to the average percentage of multiple births of daughters in first and second parity showed that some bulls had an extremely low twinning freq...

A set of FORTRAN programs to implement a multiple-trait Gibbs sampling algorithm for (co)variance component inference in animal models (MTGSAM) was developed. The MTGSAM programs are available to the public. The programs support models with correlated genetic effects and arbitrary numbers of covariates, fixed effects, and independent random effects for each trait. Any combination of missing tra...

A set of FORTRAN programs to implement a multiple-trait Gibbs sampling algorithm for (co)variance component inference in animal models (MTGSAM) was developed. The MTGSAM programs are available to the public. The programs support models with correlated genetic effects and arbitrary numbers of covariates, fixed effects, and independent random effects for each trait. Any combination of missing tra...