Not a miracle worker
—The genetic correlations are very high. Can you check them?—Sure The additive genetic variance for one of the traits was essentially zero, which pushed the correlation to get stuck at 0.99. Looking...
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All that glitters (still) is not GxE interaction
Five months ago I was saying all that glitters is not GxE interaction, putting forward the idea that, at least in forestry, some of the reported GxE interaction was not interaction at all but poor...
View ArticleSometimes we want more, sometimes we want less
I am running analyses for a new article with my colleague Clemens Altaner (a smart cookie), reprocessing old samples to get resin data. This got me thinking on types of traits, as in there are “we...
View ArticleDo you remember your first time?
You were nervous. Would they like it as much as you did? Would you make the cut? Your first manuscript as a senior author tends to be a memorable experience. On one side, you have been working a long...
View ArticleWhy is this trait I like getting worse in the breeding programme?
The short answer: because the trait you like is not part of the breeding objective and, therefore, has not an economic weight assigned to it. And if it doesn’t have an economic weight it has 0 (zero)...
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Breeding: simple interfaces, complex strategies
I found this text I wrote 20 years ago(*), part of a discussion document I prepared for a review of the radiata pine breeding strategy. Fixed a couple of typos, but I guess we still need pretty much...
View ArticleHave you visited the trials?
I was having a chat with analysts that just had a project dumped on their lap. They were questioning previous analyses as complex and were thinking of doing something much simpler and effective to...
View ArticleWhy are you complicating the analysis?
Progeny trials (or progeny testing or genetic tests or whatever you call them) are a real money pit. They are super useful, with many functions(*) but they are expensive as hell. Their establishment,...
View ArticleThere is value in better explanations
I am often fascinated by people who can explain something that I already know but in a *much better* way. For example, Howie Hua is great at looking at mathematical issues (geometric mean, in this...
View ArticleHaving a peek at sheep breeding
One of the cool things about Quantitative Genetics is that it works everywhere. As a forester, I work with trees and my analyses reflect that, accounting for the biological constraints of our species...
View ArticleBreeding trade-offs
On one side, it is obvious what we should do: increase any of the values in the numerator (selection intensity, accuracy and genetic variability) or reduce the denominator (how long it takes us to...
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When heritability is high but the phenotype is dominated by the environment
I was reading a LinkedIn post that said “heritability is the extent to which differences in observed phenotypes can be attributed to genetic differences”. There is this idea floating around assuming...
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Time for correlations
A few posts ago I was talking about heritabilities (like here) and it’s time to say something about genetic correlations. This is how I explain correlations to myself or in meetings with colleagues....
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