The trajectory of an animal's growth in early development has been shown to have long-term effects on a range of life-history traits. Although it is known that individual differences in behaviour may also be related to certain life-history traits, the linkage between early growth or development and individual variation in behaviour has received little attention. We used brief temperature manipu...

Allocation rules between ornamental and other functional traits of birds may differ among individuals and vary with environmental conditions. We supplemented roller (Coracias garrulus) nestlings with methionine in a between-nest design to investigate the way in which the sex and position in the hatching hierarchy affect the allocation of resources among growth, immunity, and plumage coloration....

The AT motif-binding factor (ATBF1) not only interacts with protein inhibitor of activated signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) (PIAS3) to suppress STAT3 signaling regulating embryo early development and cell differentiation, but is required for early activation of the pituitary specific transcription factor 1 (Pit1) gene (also known as POU1F1) critically affecting mammali...

Climatic changes impact fruit tree growth and severely limit their production. Investigating the tree ability to cope with environmental variations is thus necessary to adapt breeding and management strategies in order to ensure sustainable production. In this study, we assessed the genetic parameters and genotype by environment interaction (GxE) during the early tree growth. One hundred and tw...

Annual measurements on growth traits from a total of 275 parents and 690 full-sib families from 23 diallel tests of loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) in the Northern, Coastal and Piedmont test regions of the southeastern U.S. were used to reveal the time trend of genetic parameters through age 8. Variance components were estimated from mixed model analyses on growth traits (height, DBH and volume)...

Physiological traits associated with drought tolerance are useful as surrogate traits for drought tolerance. Information on the association of root traits and water use efficiency (WUE) and plant growth in sugarcane is rather limited. The objective of this study was to evaluate genotypic variation for root traits, WUE and growth characters of above ground parts of sugarcane. A 2 × 10 factorial ...

Plant functional traits are increasingly used to generalize across species, however few examples exist of predictions from trait-based models being evaluated in new species or new places. Can we use functional traits to predict growth of unknown species in different areas? We used three independently collected datasets, each containing data on heights of individuals from non-resprouting species...

Pistacia atlantica is the most important tree species for the economy of many rural areas in west of Iran, but no effort has been made for the genetic improvement of this species. The aim of this investigation was to study the genetic variation and inheritance of early growth traits in P. atlantica. For this purpose, three wild pistachio populations comprising 60 randomly selected adult trees f...

In the first part of the experiment, embryos of Brown Swiss-Hereford (BS-H) reciprocal crosses were transferred to BS and H recipient cows and embryos of Red Poll-Angus (RP-A) reciprocal crosses were transferred to RP and A recipient cows. Calves resulting from embryo transfers (ET) were weaned early (3 to 5 d). Males were castrated and their growth, feed efficiency and carcass composition were...