Kruuk Loeske E B
Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JT, Scotland, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2004 Jun 29;359(1446):873-90. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2003.1437.
Estimating the genetic basis of quantitative traits can be tricky for wild populations in natural environments, as environmental variation frequently obscures the underlying evolutionary patterns. I review the recent application of restricted maximum-likelihood "animal models" to multigenerational data from natural populations, and show how the estimation of variance components and prediction of breeding values using these methods offer a powerful means of tackling the potentially confounding effects of environmental variation, as well as generating a wealth of new areas of investigation.
对于自然环境中的野生种群而言,估计数量性状的遗传基础可能颇具难度,因为环境变异常常会掩盖潜在的进化模式。我回顾了受限最大似然“动物模型”在自然种群多代数据中的最新应用,并展示了使用这些方法估计方差成分和预测育种值如何提供了一种强大的手段,既能应对环境变异可能带来的混杂效应,又能催生大量新的研究领域。