Effect of Heterogeneous Variance by Sex and Genotypes by Sex Interaction on EBVs of Postweaning Daily Gain of Angus Calves

Angus postweaning daily gain (PWDG) was analyzed to investigate effects of the heterogeneous variance and the genotypes by sex interaction on prediction of EBVs with data sets of various environmental levels. A whole data (16,239 records) was divided into six data sets according to averages of the best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE) of herd environment. The results comparing prediction models showed that single-trait model is adequate for most of the data sets except for the data set of poor environment for both of the bulls and the heifers where the heterogeneity of variance and the genotypes by sex interaction exists. In the prediction with the data set of the low environment level, the bull's EBVs by single-trait models had high product moment correlations with male EBVs of the bulls by the multitrait model. Whereas the heifer's EBVs had moderate correlations with female EBVs by the multitrait model. This moderate correlation seems to be resulted by the heterogeneity of variance and low heritability of the heifer's PWDG. The prediction models with heterogeneity of variance had little effect on the prediction of EBVs for the data sets with moderate to high genetic correlations.