Table 1.

Number of environments (E _opt) and number of replications per environment (R _opt) maximizing the power of QTL detection at an experiment-wise error rate of 0.01

Assumptions			Optimum allocation				(SE)
B	l	VC	E opt	R opt	N opt	h 2opt
1.25	25	1	7	3	799	0.944	0.995 (0.0016)
		2	13	3	573	0.940	0.993 (0.0017)
		3	16	3	486	0.906	0.982 (0.0026)
	50	1	10	2	752	0.952	0.996 (0.0009)
		2	16	2	563	0.941	0.992 (0.0014)
		3	19	3	411	0.919	0.970 (0.0026)
	100	1	10	2	752	0.952	0.996 (0.0006)
		2	13	3	573	0.940	0.990 (0.0011)
		3	19	2	484	0.905	0.938 (0.0035)
2.5	25	1	16	1	1,654	0.955	0.999 (0.0007)
		2	16	1	1,654	0.914	0.998 (0.0010)
		3	16	2	1,391	0.889	0.996 (0.0013)
	50	1	10	2	1,692	0.952	0.999 (0.0005)
		2	10	2	1,692	0.909	0.998 (0.0007)
		3	19	3	1,074	0.919	0.995 (0.0010)
	100	1	7	2	1,875	0.933	0.998 (0.0005)
		2	16	1	1,654	0.914	0.997 (0.0005)
		3	19	3	1,074	0.919	0.993 (0.0004)
5	25	1	7	2	3,891	0.933	1.000 (0.0004)
		2	16	3	2,629	0.950	1.000 (0.0004)
		3	19	2	2,828	0.905	0.999 (0.0006)
	50	1	7	3	3,587	0.944	1.000 (0.0003)
		2	10	2	3,571	0.909	0.999 (0.0005)
		3	19	3	2,401	0.919	0.999 (0.0005)
	100	1	10	3	3,209	0.960	1.000 (0.0001)
		2	10	2	3,571	0.909	0.999 (0.0004)
		3	16	2	3,046	0.889	0.997 (0.0005)

N _opt the optimum number of recombinant inbred lines, h ²_opt the optimum heritability on an entry mean basis, B the total budget in million $, l the number of quantitative trait loci, VC the ratio of variance components

The costs for (1) establishing one RIL (C _dev), (2) genotyping one RIL (C _geno), and (3) testing one field plot (C _fp), and the fixed costs for each environment (C _env) were 30, 1,000, 15, and 25,000 $, respectively. For a detailed definition of the examined parameters see “Materials and methods”