Nonadditive and maternal genetic variance estimation

摘要

The aim of this review is to present some models and algorithms to estimate the direct additive, non-additive and maternal variance components. In the first part, the general questions on intra- and interlocus interactions are shown. Sources of specific maternal (indirect) and cytoplasmic variability are briefly characterised. The next section contains a literature review on the estimates of the genetic variance in different livestock species. The so-called unitrait total merit model (including known genetic effects) with its variance-covariance structure as well as currently applied approaches to estimate genetic parameters are described. In the final section some practical implications of the estimation of non-additive and maternal variances are discussed.