The lavender plumage colour in Japanese quail is associated with a complex mutation in the region of MLPH that is related to differences in growth, feed consumption and body temperature

Table 1 Parameters (mean ± SD) of the growth curves ¹ for 59 lavender ( lav/lav ) and 66 wild-type ( lav/+ ) Japanese quail, and effects of the family, sex and plumage colour on the parameters of individual curves

Parameter of the curve	Plumage colour (genotype)		Percentage of the total variance explained by the model²(R²)		Significance of the effect of plumage colour in the Full model
	Lavender (lav/lav)	Wild-type (lav/+)	Full model	Reduced model
A	204.4 ± 32.1	215.9 ± 38.3	67	65	*
B	221.4 ± 34.3	233.0 ± 39.6	71	69	*
k	0.0405 ± 0.00604	0.0401 ± 0.00759	43	43	NS

¹ with the monomolecular growth model: body weight = A-B^-kt, where A is the asymptotic body weight, B is the range of body weight from hatching to asymptotic weight, k is the relative rate of growth, and t is the age in days.
² The Full model includes the effects of (full-sib) family, sex and plumage colour, and the Reduced model does not include plumage colour.
*: p ≤ 0.05; NS: not significant.

ISSN: 1471-2164