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A note on the improvement of a trait by selecting on its components

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2010

Charles Smith
Charles Smith
Affiliation:
A.R.C. Animal Breeding Research Organisation, Edinburgh 9
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Extract

Many traits in farm animals, such as litter size or fleece weight, are the product or ratio of two or more component items. This note seeks to determine the circumstances in which selection directed at the component items is more effective in improvement than selection for the composite trait itself.

A change of one per cent in a product trait can be achieved by a change of one per cent in any of its components. The response expected on selection for a product trait or a component is proportional to h2C per cent, where h2 is the heritability and C is the coefficient of variation. Thus selection for a component trait (A) may possibly be more efficient than direct selection for the product trait (X) when is greater than . However, the correlated changes in other component traits would also have to be taken into account.

Type
Research Article
Information
Animal Production , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , February 1967 , pp. 127 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © British Society of Animal Science 1967

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References

REFERENCE

Turner, H. N., 1958. Relationships among clean wool weight and its components. Aust. J. agric. Res., 9: 521–552.CrossRefGoogle Scholar