SIZE OF HALF-SIBLING FAMILIES IN THE ESTIMATION OF GENETIC VARIANCES AND IN CORN SELECTION

Abstract

The primary objective of Genotechnology is to carry out selection for characters of economic importance, mostly determined by many genes (polygenic) and highly influenced by the environment. When partitioning the genetic variance, the additive portion is what matters to the breeder and the proportion of the additive variance to the phenotypic variance is called heritability (or heritability index), or in other words, the fraction of the phenotypic variation that is heritable.