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Genotype × environment interaction in Tribolium castaneum*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2009
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An experiment was conducted with the flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum to investigate genotype-environment interaction. Ninety-two matings of one male and three females were made at random from a large panmictic population. The females were transferred to individual containers after 4 days. Six daughters were randomly selected from each sire–dam pair and individually mated to unrelated males. Three of the six were placed in an incubator (33·3°C., 45% relative humidity) and three in a cabinet at room conditions (22·2–26·7°C., 30–35% relative humidity) and allowed to produce eggs during a 3-day period. Progeny were counted as pupae and larvae. The traits studied were number of pupae and number of pupae plus number of larvae. A transformation to (X +1)½ was required. A conventional least-squares model was employed, and a large environmental effect was observed. In the incubator the mean number of pupae was 13·4 and of pupae + larvae was 20·1 while the corresponding figures for room conditions were 3·3 and 9·2. Genotype-environment interaction accounted for 3·7 to 6·7% of the total variance for (pupae + 1)½ and 2·1 to 8·3% for (pupae + larvae+ 1)½. Heritability of the traits was essentially the same in both environments. The interaction was due to an increasing difference between environments in production associated with increasing breeding values of the sire, and to small changes in rank of breeding values on the two environments. As a result of the interaction, selection in one environment for production on the other would be expected to be only 71 to 72% as effective as direct selection for (pupae + 1)½ and 62 to 86% for (pupae + larvae + 1)½ even though the fraction of the total variance attributed to genotype-environmental interaction was less than 10%.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1964
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