| Popis: |
A random regression model was applied to estimate (co) variances, heritabilities and additive genetic correlations among average daily gains. The data was a total of 10876 records belonging to 1828 lambs (progenies of 123 sires and 743 dams) born between 1995 and 2001 in a single large size flock of Lori-Bakhtiari sheep breed in Iran. In the model, fixed environmental effects of year-season of birth, sex, birth type, age of dam and random effects of direct and maternal additive genetic and permanent environment were included. Orthogonal polynomial regression (on the Legendre scale) of third order (cubic) was utilized to model the genetic and permanent environmental (co) variance structure throughout the growth trajectory. Direct and maternal heritability estimates of average daily gains ranged from 0.011 to 0.131 and 0.008 to 0.181, respectively in which pre-weaning average daily gain (0-3 in months) had the lowest direct and highest maternal heritability estimates among the other age groups. The highest and lowest positive direct additive genetic correlations were found to be 0.993 and 0.118 between ADG (0-9) and ADG (0-12) and between ADG (0-3) and ADG (0-12), respectively. The direct additive genetic correlations between adjacent age groups were more closely than between remote age groups. |
