Improvements on growth and carcass traits in the poultry industry have been achieved by intense selection for heavier chickens at early ages. This faster growth has caused serious problems due to insufficient skeletal structure development needed to support the musculature of modern broilers. The osteoprotegerin gene (OPG), located on GGA2, is an important regulator of bone metabolism and reabs...

inheritance of yield and its contributing characters in rapeseed (brassica napus l.) was studied in a 8×8 diallel cross through griffing and jinks-hayman analyses. both general combining ability (gca) and specific combining ability (sca) were highly significant for seed yield, seed weight and branches per plant, while only gca for seeds per pod and oil content and only sca for pods per plant an...

Tensor product smooths provide the natural way of representing smooth interaction terms in regression models because they are invariant to the units in which the covariates are measured, hence avoiding the need for arbitrary decisions about relative scaling of variables. They would also be the natural way to represent smooth interactions in mixed regression models, but for the fact that the ten...

The problem of rationally engineering protein molecules can be simplified where effects of mutations on protein function are additive. Crystal structures of single and double mutants in the hydrophobic core of gene V protein indicate that structural and functional effects of core mutations are additive when the regions structurally influenced by the mutations do not substantially overlap. These...

Classical quantitative genetic analyses estimate additive and non-additive genetic and environmental components of variance from phenotypes of related individuals without knowing the identities of quantitative trait loci (QTLs). Many studies have found a large proportion of quantitative trait variation can be attributed to the additive genetic variance (VA), providing the basis for claims that ...

production of high rapeseed yield is important in rapeseed breeding programs. with regards to the importance of estimation of general combining ability (gca), specific combining ability (sca), additive and dominance genetic variances, gene action, heterosis and heritability, an experiment was carried out in a 9×9 diallel design. nine parents with 36 crosses were studied in a randomized complete...

One of the major field constraints to seed production in safflower has proven tobe soil born pathogens, Phytophthora drechsleri and Pythium ultimum. In order toevaluate the efficiency of a field-laboratory selection method to improve resistanceof safflower against soil born pathogens, Ph. drechsleri and P. ultimum, a two-yearinvestigation was conducted. The results showed that selection is an e...

Four advanced breeding lines of wheat which had appeared to be resistant to stripe rust in the past years along with a susceptible variety, Bolani, were intercrossed in all combinations of a half-diallel design. Seedlings were grown in greenhouse until the first leaves fully expanded and then inoculated with two pathotypes (races) 6E134A+ and 134E148A+, separately. Days to the first pustule eru...