الفهرس 
Wool characteristicsOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Data were collected from70 adult ewes of different ages and weights taken from the flock of Barki sheep at Tegzerty Research Station, situated at Siwa Oasis, to study the association between some wool and reproductive traits of ewes under the Egyptian desert conditions using the General Linear Model procedure. The model included wool class as fixed effect and adult weight of ewe as a covariate. The phenotypic correlation coefficients between wool and reproductive traits were calculated using the unadjusted data.
The variability of the traits (i.e. CV %) considered in this study varies considerably among them. This may be explained by the great differences in the nature of these traits. It was found that wool classs had a significant effect only on both fiber diameter (FD) and coarse fibers percentage (CF %). However, its effect on the other studied traits was not significant (P>0.05). Generally, ewes having fine wool class (i.e. class 1) showed lower values for both FD (Mean = 21.9µ) and CF % (Mean = 20.2 %), compared with ewes having coarse wool classes (i.e. classes 3 and 4). Most of the correlation coefficients between wool and reproductive traits are close to zero and statistically not significant (P>0.05). This indicates that selection for improving wool characteristics in Barki sheep should not have a negative impact on the reproductive performance of ewes.
The forward selection procedure was also used in this work to assign the wool traits which significantly contribute to the variability of each one of the ewe reproductive traits. It showed that non of the wool characteristics acts solely to modify reproductive performance of Barki ewes, and in order to obtain significant effect many wool traits should be changed.