objective: to analyze the trend in maternal mortality ratio in a tertiary care centre and the effect of various maternity schemes on it. materials and methods:  retrospective analysis of all maternal deaths occurring in the guru gobind singh medical college & hospital, faridkot, punjab, india was done from jan 2010 to dec 2012. every maternal death was scrutinized from various aspects like dire...

Estimates of genetic parameters resulting from various analytical models for birth weight (BWT, n = 4,155), 205-d weight (WWT, n = 3,884), and 365-d weight (YWT, n = 3,476) were compared. Data consisted of records for Line 1 Hereford cattle selected for postweaning growth from 1934 to 1989 at ARS-USDA, Miles City, MT. Twelve models were compared. Model 1 included fixed effects of year, sex, age...

Optimum weighting ratios of maternal:direct EBV for litter size using an animal model were examined to achieve maximum genetic improvement (direct plus maternal response). Stochastic simulation of a 120-sow herd over a 10-yr period of selection was used (20 replicates). Directional selection was based on a merit function of maternal and direct EBV for first-parity litter size. Optimum weighting...

There are profound maternal effects on individual differences in defensive responses and reproductive strategies in species ranging literally from plants to insects to birds. Maternal effects commonly reflect the quality of the environment and are most likely mediated by the quality of the maternal provision (egg, propagule, etc.), which in turn determines growth rates and adult phenotype. In t...

Quality Protein Maize (QPM) has about twice the amount of lysine and tryptophan of normal maize and hence represents an important tool of correcting its deficiency in protein quality. However, the effects of low nitrogen and drought on genetic parameters such as gene action and combining abilities of protein quantity and quality of QPM are not known. To study how these genetic parameters are af...

The genetic parameters and (co) variance components of body weight at birth (BW), weaning (WW) and six months of age (BW6) and average daily gain (ADG) pre and post-weaning of Afshari sheep were estimated using restricted maximum likelihood (REML) methodology and animal model implemented in DFREML software. The likelihood ratio test (LRT) was used to compare the models. Year of birth, age of mo...

The aim of this study was to model the variances and covariances of body weight in Zandi sheep from 60 to 365 days of age using random regression models (RRM). Legendre polynomials of different orders were used to model the direct and maternal covariances. Mean trends were also modeled through a quadratic regression on orthogonal polynomials of age. Homogeneity and heterogeneity of the residual...

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 ...

Effects of foster dams can be included in genetic evaluations using animal models with maternal effects in several ways. The alternatives discussed involve minor changes in computing strategies from strategies used with reduced animal models that predict breeding values for direct and maternal effects. The easiest alternative is to assign foster dams to groups by breed and time period and add e...