Genetic divergence among three lineages of meat-type hens from the Genetic Breeding Program of the Universidade Federal de Viçosa was evaluated for the following traits: days at first egg (DPPO), egg production rate (TP) from 22nd to 56th week, body weight on the 32nd (PMI1), on 40th (PMI2), at 48th (PMI3), at 56th (PMI4) and at the 64th week (PMI5), egg weight on the 32nd (PMO1), on 40th (PMO2), at 48th (PMO3), at 56th (PMO4) and at the 64th week (PMO5). Traits were measured on 270 hens (90 of each lineage) and two different methods were used to evaluate genetic divergence. For the single linkage hierarchical method, using the squared Mahalanobis distance (D²) as the dissimilarity measure, only one single group was formed. When using Tocher's optimization method, two groups were formed, thus indicating a disagreement between the results of the two methods. PMO1 (25.71%), DDPO (21.76%), PMI4 (17.65%) e PMI2 (13.04%) were the traits with the most expressive relative contributions to genetic divergence among the lineages.
broiler; Mahalanobis distance; single linkage; Tocher optimization method
