A SAS code to estimate phenotypic-genotypic covariance and correlation matrices based on expected value of statistical designs to use in plant breeding

Abstract

Phenotypic-genotypic covariance and correlation have been useful in crop and animal breeding programs. In the study of diversity of natural populations and different cultivars of plants that are examined based on statistical design, estimation of genotypic-phenotypic covariance through expected value of statistical designs mean square is hard and time-consuming when the number of studied traits is high. Moreover, the lack of a program in this field and manual calculations make the estimation more complicated. Therefore, in this study, one program was developed in SAS that can be used to calculate the genotypic-phenotypic covariance matrix through the first part of the program based on the expected value of applied statistical designs mean square. Then, based on the covariance matrix computed from the previous design model, their correlation matrix was calculated using the second part of the program based on the interactive matrix language (IML) of SAS. The phenotypic-genotypic covariance matrices of the 12 studied traits of rice are calculated based on this code. This program could compute phenotypic-genotypic covariance and correlation matrices based on the expected value of any statistical designs.

Key words
Computer program; covariance matrix; estimation; genetic correlation; plant breeding; statistical design