Additive and dominance genetic variance of fertility by method R and preconditioned conjugate gradient

The objectives of this study were threefold: 1) estimation of additive and dominance genetic variances for fertility traits for Austrian Simmental and Brown Swiss dairy cattle; 2) use of method R and the preconditioned conjugate gradient compared to solving for method R by second-order Jacobi iteration; and 3) study of the impact of inclusion of parental subclass effects on solutions for other random effects. Dominance variances were modeled for the inseminated cow and ranged from 0.32 to 1.36% of total variance. These values were similar to values for additive effects, which were approximately 1% of total variance. Convergence was clearly improved with preconditioned conjugate gradient and number of extrapolations reduced. Variance for permanent environment under a model without dominance could be split into a new estimate of permanent environmental variance and parental subclass variance. Solutions for parental subclass dominance effects were approximately proportional to permanent environment effects, but highly dependent on the number of animals contributing dominance relationships, especially full-sibs and three-quarter-sibs. For animals with a lot of dominance information (full-sibs, three-quarter-sibs, cousins), permanent environment and parental subclass dominance effects were nearly independent. Changes in additive effects were negligible, probably because both variances for parental subclass dominance effects and additive genetic effects were very small compared with residual variance.