Is sex determination in Merinos heritable?

Title
Is sex determination in Merinos heritable?
Publication Date
2021
Author(s)
Granleese, T
Mortimer, M R
Walkom, S F
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2275-0318
Email: swalkom@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:swalkom
Abstract
Paper presented by T Granleese.
Type of document
Conference Publication
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Association for the Advancement of Animal Breeding and Genetics (AAABG)
Place of publication
Armidale, Australia
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/40064
Abstract

This paper investigates the ability of different linear mixed models to estimate the heritability of sex determination in a sub-set of the Australian Merino population. The dataset used was from Centre Plus Merinos in central-west New South Wales with 25 plus years of full pedigree collection and over 20,000 lambing events where the sex of the progeny were recorded. This study used sex of a lamb as a trait, (i.e. zero phenotype for female and one phenotype for male). We observed a significant, yet normal, amount of phenotypic variation in the sex ratio of progeny for dams, sires, maternal grand sires and maternal grand dams. However, no model was able to estimate significant genetic variation in sex determination and failed to return a heritability above 0.01. Consequently, it can be concluded within this dataset that it would not be possible to select to alter sex determination in Merinos.

Link
Citation
Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Animal Breeding and Genetics, v.24, p. 131-134
ISSN
1328-3227
Start page
131
End page
134

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