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Estimating the heritability of butterfat production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2009

S. R. Searle
S. R. Searle
Affiliation:
N.Z. Dairy Board, Wellington, New Zealand
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Extract

Part of the variation among butterfat yields in dairy cows arises from genetic differences among the animals. The proportion which this bears to the total variance is known as heritability. In the ‘narrow’ sense it is defined (Lush, 1940), as the proportion of the total variance that is due to additive gene effects; the ‘broad’ sense definition includes genetic variation arising from non-additive gene effects as well as that due to additive effects. Since related animals have a proportion of their genes in common the covariance among their production records can be used for estimating genetic variation and hence heritability. This paper discusses three groups of related animals most frequently used for this purpose, twins, daughter-dam pairs and paternal half-sibs, and presents the results of analysing production records of artificially bred heifers in New Zealand, including evidence of the magnitude of the sampling errors of the heritability estimates.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Agricultural Science , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , November 1961 , pp. 289 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1961

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References

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