Simulation of marker assisted selection for non-additive traits.

Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) based on additive effects associated with alleles at marker loci, estimated by linear regression of individual phenotype on the markers, was applied to characters with non-additive gene action and non-additive environment. The base population was the F2 generation of a cross between two inbred lines. Computer simulations of MAS were conducted for characters with dominance, epistasis and genotype-environment interaction approximated by the 'additive-multiplicative' model. MAS was more effective than purely phenotypic selection in all cases. The efficiency of MAS for characters with non-additive gene action is comparable to (and for negative dominance even higher than) the efficiency of MAS for strictly additive characters. Environmental non-additivity, however, lowers the efficiency of MAS. Almost all results concerning the efficiency of MAS in our previous simulations of purely additive traits are applicable to non-additive traits.