The results obtained in this study indicate that differences in gut fermentation and anatomy are not a major cause of differences in wool production among sheep of different estimated genetic merit for fleece weight when fed restricted intakes.
SLN provided pedigree and estimated genetic merit data and SB and BWW provided genotypes on about 900 Angus animals.
Patterson and Pyle's (2 ) conservative estimate of a global rate of 1.66% and Johnson and Mueller's (3 ) substantial upward revision of that percentage to 2.77% suggest that the estimates for Japan, which are less than one quarter of the latter estimate, merit closer scrutiny.
These data combined with phenotypic data can be used to estimate genetic merit [1] or predict phenotypic values [2] for the trait of interest.
With the availability of high density whole-genome single nucleotide polymorphism chips, genomic selection has become a promising method to estimate genetic merit with potentially high accuracy for animal, plant and aquaculture species of economic importance.
Genomic selection estimates genetic merit based on dense SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) genotypes and phenotypes.
An application of the RKHS regression approach to estimate genetic merit for early mortality in broilers from SNP data is described in [ 27].
This illustrates that an increase in genomic prediction accuracy is less useful when more information is already available to estimate genetic merit.
In practice, accuracy increases but the generation interval is extended by waiting until the individual or offspring phenotypic records are available to estimate genetic merit, usually decreasing selection response.
To estimate genetic merit, a lower genomic coverage could be compensated by a low error rate and vice versa since in practice, genotyping errors are prone to escape correction since the true genotypes are unknown.
But phenotypes of all living organisms represent the consequence of several genetic components including epistatic effects and their interactions with environment; therefore, to estimate genetic merit relevant to the epistases and their interactions with environment certainly plays a crucial role in planning an effective breeding regime [ 20, 21].
