GENETIC ASPECTS IN SOME GROWTH AND MEASUREMENTS TRAITS IN BALADI BLACK RABBITS

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Animal Production Research Institute, Agricultural Research Center, Ministry of Agriculture, Giza, Egypt.

2 Department of Animal Production, Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt.

Abstract

A total of 109 progeny of 8 sires and 19 dams from a Baladi Black random breed population were used to estimate the heritability and genetic correlations of juvenile growth traits. The traits were individual body weight (BW), body length (BL), chest circumference (CC) and thigh circumference (TC) at 6, 8, 10 and 12 weeks of age. Multi-Trait Derivative-Free Restricted Maximum Likelihood Animal Model (DFREML) was used to estimate the genetic variance components, permanent environmental variation and transmitting ability (BLUP) estimates. Additive genetic variance of body weight traits ranged from 16.7% at 6 weeks to 44.0% at 10 weeks. The heritability estimates ranged from 0.18 to 0.42 for body weights, from 0.25 to 0.63 for body lengths, from 0.23 to 0.62 for chest circumferences and from 0.02 to 0.45 for thigh circumferences. High positive genetic correlation estimates were obtained between most of the traits. The ranges of top 25% of the animals using BW and BL data seemed to increase with age. For CC and TC traits, inconsistent trends were revealed for the top 25% of all data
Conclusively, the results revealed moderate to high heritability estimates and positive BLUP estimates for growth traits with a sire replacement rate of 20-25%, and this indicates that selection for growth can be successfully practiced in Baladi Black rabbits.

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