EASY AND FLEXIBLE BAYESIAN INFERENCE OF QUANTITATIVE GENETIC PARAMETERS

There has been a tremendous advancement of Bayesian methodology in quantitative genetics and evolutionary biology. Still, there are relatively few publications that apply this methodology, probably because the availability of multipurpose and user-friendly software is somewhat limited. It is here described how only a few rows of code of the well-developed and very flexible Bayesian software WinBUGS (Lunn et al. 2000) can be used for inference of the additive polygenic variance and heritabilty in pedigrees of general design. The presented code is illustrated by application to an earlier published dataset of Scots pine.