Building on Falconer's work on environmental sensitivity and scale

Abstract

<p>Reaction norms are popular for analysing the genetics of environmental sensitivity in animals. The slope of the reaction norm is directly used as a measure of sensitivity. However, some of the variation in slope might be due to differences in the scale of the genetic variance. This problem was considered in 1990 by Falconer in the context of phenotypic reaction norms. This paper extends his work into the current use of genetic random regression reaction norms. A simple post-hoc method to estimate breeding values for environmental sensitivity independent of scale effects while accommodating for higher-order polynomials is proposed. A small example is used for illustration.</p>