Bedeutung der Varianzkomponentenschätzung für die Zucht von landwirtschaftlichen Nutztieren – eine Übersicht

Abstract. Title of the paper: The importance of variance components estimation in breeding of farm animals – a review
The present paper showed the importance of variance components estimation in animal breeding. Beside the use of variance components for estimation of breeding values, the components have a high importance on further breeding aspects, such as indication of selection limits, optimisation of test period, change of Performance during growth, and determination of the best selection traits. Maternal and non-additive genetic variance components can be estimated and their high influence on choice of the optimal selection strategy are explained. Standard errors of crossbreeding parameters are influenced by genetic relationships and are only unbiased when using all genetic variances and covariances among animals. Genotype-environmental-interaction and heterogeneous variances, which result in high reduction in selection response, can be obtained in a variance components estimation. The high value of Bayesian methods in order to describe the sampling variance of variance components and to account for the Standard error of estimation of variance components in the estimation of breeding values is explained.