Comparing the Genetic Parameter of Body Weight Estimated with 2 Methods in Thai Indigenous Chicken

Abstract

Fourty-one of Thai indigenous female chickens were raised individually in the double desk battery for 120 days period of egg collection. The average egg production was 26 eggs per hen and the range of the trait was 61. The 4, 6 and 8 weeks body weight of progenies derived from the nested mating of 13 males and 27 females were 164.46, 343.83 and 555.91 grams and the coefficient of variation (CV) of these traits were 17.77, 17.30 and 17.84 respectively. The genetic variation and the heritability derived from sire and dam components which analysed by REML showed a higher value than analysed by ANOVA in all traits. The heritabilities were ranged between 0.25-0.85 in REML method and ranged between 0.21-0.73 in ANOVA method. The standard error (SE) of the heritabilities computed from ANOVA method showed medium to high value of 0.19-0.45. The genetic and phenotypic correlation between these traits revealed a high value of 0.83-0.97 and 0.71- 0.86 respectively. However, the genetic correlation between some traits were more than 1 which was outside the parameter space due to an unappropriated analysis method