BRAZILIAN JOURNAL OF POULTRY SCIENCE, cilt.16, sa.2, ss.51-56, 2014 (SCI-Expanded)
The aim of this study was to estimate the heritability for some
growth traits of Japanese quail through the estimation of variance
components by Bayesian methodology. For this purpose, 340 progenies
of 34 sires were used. Live weight (LW42) and absolute and relative
growth rates at 42 days of age (AGR42 and RGR42, respectively)
were submitted to single-trait analysis under a sire model. A software
(package MCMCglmm) was used for the estimations, and a single chain
with 65,000 rounds was run for each trait with a thinning interval of
50. Burn-in was set at 15,000 and inferences were built on posterior
samples of 1,000 draws for each trait. All marginal posterior densities
were unimodal and marginal posterior distributions of sire variance
are slightly skewed to the right. The results of the analyses showed
high, moderate, and low heritability of LW42, AGR42, and RGR42,
respectively.