Genetic correlations and maternal effect coefficients obtained from offspring-parent regression.
Additive genetic variances and covariances of quantitative characters are necessary to predict the evolutionary response of the mean phenotype vector in a population to natural or artificial selection. Standard formulas for estimating these parameters, from the resemblance between relatives in one or two characters at a time, are biased by natural selection on the parents and by maternal effects. We show how these biases can be removed using a multivariate analysis of offspring-parent regressions. A dynamic model of maternal effects demonstrates that, in addition to the phenotypic variance-covariance matrix of the characters, sufficient parameters for predicting the response of the mean phenotype vector to weak selection are the additive genetic variance-covariance matrix and a set of causal coefficients for maternal effects. These can be simultaneously estimated from offspring-parent regressions alone, in some cases just from the daughter-mother regressions, if all of the important selected and maternal characters have been measured and included in the analysis.
Department of Ecology, University of Chicago, Illinois 60637.
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Lande
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D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D005260:Female; D014644:Genetic Variation; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009035:Mothers; D010641:Phenotype; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012641:Selection, Genetic