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Heritability and variance components of seed size in wild species: influences of breeding design and the number of genotypes tested

Heredity volume 130, pages 251–258 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Seed size affects individual fitness in wild plant populations, but its ability to evolve may be limited by low narrow-sense heritability (h2). h2 is estimated as the proportion of total phenotypic variance (σ2P) attributable to additive genetic variance (σ2A), so low values of h2 may be due to low σ2A (potentially eroded by natural selection) or to high values of the other factors that contribute to σ2P, such as extranuclear maternal effects (m2) and environmental variance effects (e2). Here, we reviewed the published literature and performed a meta-analysis to determine whether h2 of seed size is routinely low in wild populations and, if so, which components of σ2P contribute most strongly to total phenotypic variance. We analyzed available estimates of narrow-sense heritability (h2) of seed size, as well as the variance components contributing to these parameters. Maternal and environmental components of σ2P were significantly greater than σ2A, dominance, paternal, and epistatic components. These results suggest that low h2 of seed size in wild populations (the mean value observed in this study was 0.13) is due to both high values of maternally derived and environmental (residual) σ2, and low values of σ2A in seed size. The type of breeding design used to estimate h2 and m2 also influenced their values, with studies using diallel designs generating lower variance ratios than nested and other designs. e2 was not influenced by breeding design. For some breeding designs, the number of genotypes included in a study also influenced the resulting h2 and e2 estimates, but not m2. Our data support the view that a diallel design is better suited than the alternatives for the accurate estimation of σ2A in seed size due to its factorial design and the inclusion of reciprocal crosses, which allows the independent estimation of both additive and non-additive components of variance.

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Fig. 1: Marginal means of the alternative variance ratios extracted from a generalized quasi-binomial mixed-effects model.
Fig. 2: Marginal means from three generalized quasi-binomial mixed-effects models which represent three variance ratios separately as response variables as a function of breeding design, the number of genotypes, and the interaction between breeding design and the number of genotypes.

Data availability

Database and R code are available at the Dryad data repository https://doi.org/10.25349/D9660G.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers who made insightful comments on the manuscript that helped improve the analysis and the results. Authors would also like to thank the UCMexus grant program for financial support for EL while he was in residence as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at UCSB. SJM is very grateful to the Yale Institute of Biospheric Studies, which provided sabbatical support during 2019-2020, when much of this work was conducted.

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  1. Eugenio Larios

    Present address: Programa Educativo de Licenciado en Ecología, Universidad Estatal de Sonora, Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology Evolution and Marine Biology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Eugenio Larios, Tadeo H. Ramirez-Parada & Susan J. Mazer

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  1. Eugenio Larios
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  2. Tadeo H. Ramirez-Parada
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  3. Susan J. Mazer
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Contributions

EL and SJM designed the study and proposed hypotheses. EL extracted all values from the published literature and drafted the first version of the manuscript. EL and TRP performed statistical analyses. All authors contributed with the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Eugenio Larios.

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Larios, E., Ramirez-Parada, T.H. & Mazer, S.J. Heritability and variance components of seed size in wild species: influences of breeding design and the number of genotypes tested. Heredity 130, 251–258 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-023-00597-7

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