Data from: Rapid decline of prenatal maternal effects with age is independent of postnatal environment in a precocial bird
Data files
Sep 06, 2023 version files 723.91 KB
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growth_model.txt
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maternal_by_environment_interactions.txt
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pedigree.txt
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README.md
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Vedder_et_al_m2_quail_AnalyticalCode.txt
Abstract
Maternal effects are an important source of phenotypic variation with potentially large fitness consequences, but how their importance varies with the quality of the environment across an individual’s ontogeny is poorly understood. We bred Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) of known pedigree and experimentally manipulated the quality of offspring diet to estimate the importance of prenatal maternal effects in shaping variation in body mass from hatching to adulthood. Maternal genetic effects on body mass at hatching were strong, and largely caused by variation in egg mass, but their importance rapidly declined with age. Whereas there was a large effect of diet on growth, this did not affect the decline of maternal effects variance. The importance of additive genetic and residual variance increased with age, with the latter being considerably larger in the poor diet treatment. Hence, we found no evidence for prenatal maternal effect by postnatal environment interactions, and that prenatal maternal effects are rapidly replaced by direct additive genetic and residual effects when offspring start to develop outside the egg. Thereby these results shed new light on the dynamics of the role of maternal versus offspring genes across ontogeny and environments.
README
This repository contains data files and R-codes used for a project on quantitative genetics of maternal effects and genotype-by-environment interactions using data from a population of captive Japanese quails. Specifically, the repository contains files used in the following study:
Vedder O, Tschirren B, Postma E, Moiron M; Rapid decline of prenatal maternal effects with age is independent of postnatal environment in a precocial bird. 2023 Evolution (preprinted in bioRxiv with doi: 10.1101/2023.05.26.542383)
For any further information on statistical analyses, please contact: Maria Moiron, email: mariamoironc@gmail.com For any further information on data, please contact: Oscar Vedder, email: oscar.vedder@ifv-vogelwarte.de
growth_model.text
This file contains the phenotypic data used for an univariate animal model testing for the effect of diet on the body mass growth of Japanese quails, reported in Table S2.
offspring.ID: individual offspring unique identifier
mother.ID: individual mother unique identifier
father.ID: individual father unique identifier
year: year of the experiment (i.e., of measurement)
> mother.type: category variable with two levels: high and low\, representing the two different maternal selection lines.
father.type: category variable with two levels: high and low, representing the two different paternal selection lines.
mother.replicate: categorical variable with two levels: 1 and 2, representing the two maternal line replicates used in the experiment.
father.replicate: categorical variable with two levels: 1 and 2, representing the two paternal line replicates used in the experiment.
f: inbreeding coefficient of each individual offspring
chick.diet: category of the diet treatment that each offspring was assigned to, two levels: standard and poor
chick.sex: sex of each individual offspring (being 1 = males)
mass: body mass measured in grams
age: age of the individual offspring, measured in days after hatching (being 0 = hatching, 7= seven days old, and so on)
maternal_by_environment_interactions.txt
This file contains the phenotypic data used in a series bivariate animal models testing for maternal by environment interactions, reported in Table S3 and S4.
offspring.ID: individual offspring unique identifier
mother.ID: individual mother unique identifier
father.ID: individual father unique identifier
year: year of the experiment (i.e., of measurement)
mother.type: category variable with two levels: high and low, representing the two different maternal selection lines.
father.type: category variable with two levels: high and low, representing the two different paternal selection lines.
mother.replicate: categorical variable with two levels: 1 and 2, representing the two maternal line replicates used in the experiment.
father.replicate: categorical variable with two levels: 1 and 2, representing the two paternal line replicates used in the experiment.
f: inbreeding coefficient of each individual offspring
chick.diet: category of the diet treatment that each offspring was assigned to, two levels: standard and poor
chick.sex: sex of each individual offspring (being 1 = males)
mass.d0: body mass measured in grams at day 0 (i.e., at hatching)
mass.d7: body mass measured in grams at day 7 from hatching
mass.d14: body mass measured in grams at day 14 from hatching
mass.d21: body mass measured in grams at day 21 from hatching
mass.d28: body mass measured in grams at day 28 from hatching
mass.d35: body mass measured in grams at day 35 from hatching
mass.d42: body mass measured in grams at day 42 from hatching
mass.d49: body mass measured in grams at day 49 from hatching
mass.d56: body mass measured in grams at day 56 from hatching
mass.d63: body mass measured in grams at day 63 from hatching
mass.d70: body mass measured in grams at day 70 from hatching
mass.d77: body mass measured in grams at day 77 from hatching
mass.d84: body mass measured in grams at day 84 from hatching
pedigree.txt
This file contains the pedigree for a captive population of Japanese quails. Headings follow the norm for pedigrees and are self-explanatory.
Methods
Body mass data of Japanese quail chicks, fed with either a standard or a poor quality diet, was collected by by weighing individuals at standard ages with weekly intervals after hatching, until 12 weeks old. Pedigree data was collected by up to 12 generations of selective pairwise mating.
Usage notes
All files can be opened in R.