The intense focus on studying human height has done more than any other genetic analysis to advance our understanding of the heritability of highly complex phenotypes. Here, we describe in detail the properties of a previously unexplored trait in Drosophila melanogaster that shares many salient properties with human height. The total length of the pupal case varies between 2.8 and 3.9 mm among ...

The reason for our focus, indeed obsession, on the heritability is that it determines the degree of resemblance between parents and offspring, which in turn determines the response to selection. In particular, the slope of a midparent-offspring regression is just h = VA/VP . The fact that the regression involves midparents implies sexual reproduction. In many plant breeding settings, the parent...

Heritability is a concept that summarizes the proportion of phenotypic variance that is due to genetic factors, with broad-sense heritability referring to genetic variation that may include effects due to dominance and epistasis, and narrow-sense heritability referring to additive genetic variation. The popular GCTA software uses the random effects approach to estimate the narrow-sense heritabi...

The goal of this review article is to provide a conceptual based summary of how heritability estimates for complex traits such as obesity are determined and to explore the future directions of research in the heritability field. The target audience are researchers who use heritability data rather than those conducting heritability studies. The article provides an introduction to key concepts cr...

The prediction of gains from selection allows the comparison of breeding methods and selection strategies, although these estimates may be biased. The objective of this study was to investigate the extent of such bias in predicting genetic gain. For this, we simulated 10 cycles of a hypothetical breeding program that involved seven traits, three population classes, three experimental conditions...

The concept of the mutation component of a genetic trait is discussed and its relation to heritability investigated. It is found that for qualitative traits held in the population by opposing directional selection and mutation, the mutation component equals the broad sense heritability. The mutational component of a quantitative trait with an intermediate optimum is found generally to be betwee...

Abstract Determination of gene effects and combining abilities is a critical stage in maize hybrid breeding. In the present study, 20 S6 lines as female and three S6 inbred lines (K18, K19 and K1264/5-1) as tester were crossed and the resulting  test cross progenies were evaluated in a randomized complete block design with three replications in 2008. During the growing period, several agronomi...