Environmental Variance Components of Fruit Ripening Date as Used in Both Phenotypic and Marker-assisted Selection in Japanese Pear Breeding

Abstract

The effectiveness of detected quantitative trait loci (QTLs) and molecular markers associated with them in tree fruit breeding is measured by the percentages of the variance associated with detected QTL effects accounting for not phenotypic variance, but genetic variance of the trait. The genetic variance can be obtained by subtracting environmental variance from the phenotypic variance. Once accurate environmental variance components are obtained for a given selection field, environmental variances under any number of replications and measurement repetitions can be estimated. We estimated environmental variance components of fruit ripening date measured by days in a Japanese pear (Pyrus pyrifolia Nakai) breeding field in the National Institute of Fruit Tree Science, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. We estimated variance among fruits within a tree (σf2) as 25.6, among trees within a genotype (σt2) as 0.2, among years (σy2) as 9.4, associated with genotype × year interaction (σgy2) as 7.9, and associated with tree × year interaction (σty2) as 1.2. Because σf2 was the largest environmental variance component, increasing the number of fruit evaluated would most effectively reduce the environmental variance, and tree replication would not because of very small σt2 and σty2. The 95% confidence limit of a genotypic value was ± 10 days in the evaluation of five fruits on a single tree in a year and ± 7 days over 2 years. Broad-sense heritability in a family, each offspring in which was evaluated using five fruits on a single tree in a single year, was estimated at 0.83 for three full-sib families analyzed.