a replicate selection—the idea here being that the chance of randomly fixing the same alleles in two independent selections is very small. The experimental design used in the current study extends this design by using two independent selections, which were predicted to generate reciprocal QTLs. Given the size of the SNP panel used to genotype animals, it was expected that one reciprocal QTL would be detected by chance. However, the chance probability of detecting seven reciprocal QTLs is very small (~10−21), and thus, we assume that the majority of these QTLs are real. Although not an independent experiment, the observation that we were able to confirm six of the seven QTLs in the founding HS4 population supports this position.
