Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2010 Jan;184(1):277-84.
doi: 10.1534/genetics.109.110759. Epub 2009 Nov 9.

A genetic analysis of mortality in pigs

Luis Varona  1 , Daniel Sorensen
Affiliations

A genetic analysis of mortality in pigs

Luis Varona et al. Genetics. 2010 Jan.

Abstract

An analysis of mortality is undertaken in two breeds of pigs: Danish Landrace and Yorkshire. Zero-inflated and standard versions of hierarchical Poisson, binomial, and negative binomial Bayesian models were fitted using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). The objectives of the study were to investigate whether there is support for genetic variation for mortality and to study the quality of fit and predictive properties of the various models. In both breeds, the model that provided the best fit to the data was the standard binomial hierarchical model. The model that performed best in terms of the ability to predict the distribution of stillbirths was the hierarchical zero-inflated negative binomial model. The best fit of the binomial hierarchical model and of the zero-inflated hierarchical negative binomial model was obtained when genetic variation was included as a parameter. For the hierarchical binomial model, the estimate of the posterior mean of the additive genetic variance (posterior standard deviation in brackets) at the level of the logit of the probability of a stillbirth was 0.173(0.039) in Landrace and 0.202(0.048) in Yorkshire. The implications of these results from a breeding perspective are briefly discussed.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Arango, J., I. Misztal, S. Tsuruta, M. Culbertson, J. W. Holl et al., 2006. Genetic study of individual preweaning mortality and birth weight in large white piglets using threshold linear models. Livestock Sci. 101 208–218.
    1. Besag, J., 1974. Spatial interaction and the statistical analysis of lattice systems (with discussion). J. R. Statist. Soc. Ser. B 36 192–236.
    1. Dempster, A. P., 1997. The direct use of likelihood for significance testing. Statist. Comput. 7 247–252.
    1. Foulley, J. L., D. Gianola and S. Im, 1987. Genetic evaluation of traits distributed as Poisson-binomial with reference to reproductive characters. Theor. Appl. Genet. 73 870–877. - PubMed
    1. Gelfand, A. E., 1996. Model determination using sampling-based methods, pp. 145–161 in Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Practice, edited by W. R. Gilks, S. Richardson, and D. J. Spiegelhalter. Chapman & Hall, New York.