(Co)variance components and genetic parameters for test day ewe body weight of Lori-Bakhtiari sheep were estimated using a random regression model (RRM). The data consisted of 22153 individual body weight records, obtained from 1994 ewes (progeny of 205 sires and 1010 dams) between 371 and 3416 days of age, collected from the flock stud of Lori-Bakhtiari Sheep Breeding Station in Shahrekord, Ir...

Environmental factors play a key role in the development of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), but the long-term effects of these factors are still unclear. This study analyses data from 1024 monozygotic (identical) twins in Australia, the United States, and Scandinavia who were assessed for ADHD in Preschool, Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. Differences within each twin pair w...

We present a review of empirical evidence that suggests that a substantial portion of phenotypic variance is due to non-linear (epigenetic) processes during ontogenesis. The role of such processes as a source of phenotypic variance in human behavior genetic studies is not fully appreciated. In addition to our review, we present simulation studies of nonlinear epigenetic variance using a computa...

The rock-restricted cichlid fish assemblages of Lake Malawi exhibit high spatial diversity in their species composition and relative abundance. However the extent to which this is due to the effects of local environmental differences, dispersal limitation of constituent taxa, and the assignment of allopatric populations to species is uncertain. We examined the factors associated with diversity ...

Ecological communities are subjected to stochasticity in the form of demographic and environmental variance. Stochastic models that contain only demographic variance (neutral models) provide close quantitative fits to observed species-abundance distributions (SADs) but substantially underestimate observed temporal species-abundance fluctuations. To provide a holistic assessment of whether model...

The relative influence of genetics and the environment on factors associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) and metabolic syndrome (MetS) remains unclear. We performed model-fitting analyses to quantify genetic, common environmental, and unique environmental variance components of factors associated with CVD and MetS [waist circumference, blood pressure, fasting plasma glucose and insulin, h...

in order to study on adaptability and grain yield stability of eight bread wheat cultivars (alvand, alamout, zarrin, navid, azar 2, sabalan, omid and bezostiya), a rcbd experiment was conducted during three cropping seasons (2007-2010) at six locations (sanandaj, gorveh, marivan, divandarreh, saggez and baneh). simple analysis of variance (anova) and combined anova for three years in each locat...