Open AccessBetween‐family variation and quantitative genetics of developmental instability of long bones in rabbit foetuses
Author(s) -
Breno Matteo,
Bots Jessica,
Van Dongen Stefan
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
biological journal of the linnean society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.906
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1095-8312
pISSN - 0024-4066
DOI - 10.1111/bij.12051
Subject(s) - heritability , biology , fluctuating asymmetry , genetic variation , quantitative genetics , evolutionary biology , repeatability , variation (astronomy) , variance components , maternal effect , additive genetic effects , genetics , statistics , offspring , gene , mathematics , pregnancy , physics , astrophysics
The genetic basis of developmental instability ( DI ) remains largely unknown as a result of its morphological expression, fluctuating asymmetry ( FA ), poorly reflecting DI , especially if few traits are studied. The typically low values of heritability of FA ( h 2 FA ) can be translated into higher values of DI ( h 2 DI ) by the hypothetical repeatability, yet leading to wide confidence intervals. Thus, high sample sizes and/or several traits are indispensible for reaching meaningful conclusions. To obtain more insights into quantitative genetic variation of DI , we investigated between‐family variance in DI in six long bones of 1126 foetuses of the N ew Z ealand white rabbit from a full‐sib experiment. We applied different approaches to obtain genetic parameters for DI . Heritabilities and the coefficients of between‐family variation ( CVB ) were calculated for six individual traits and composite indices. The results obtained, despite a likely upward bias as a result of maternal and non‐additive effects, lend support to the presence of moderate additive genetic variance for DI . It is suggested that, in foetal traits, the environmental variance was minimal, leading to a high likelihood of detecting genetic variation in DI , thus creating an ideal model system for studying the genetic basis of DI . © 2013 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society , 2013, 109 , 33–42.