Fig. 4

The “pure” design. Precision estimates for the pure design (no dominance estimate) consisting of four contact groups per replicate with homogeneous seeder/contact SNP genotypes illustrated in Fig. 2b. The left, middle and right columns show graphs for standard deviations (SDs) in the posterior distributions for the SNP effects for susceptibility \({a}_{g}\), infectivity \({a}_{f}\) and recoverability \({a}_{r}\) under different scenarios. a The fraction of seeder individuals in each contact group is varied. b The number of experimental replicates, each consisting of four contact groups, is varied (with smaller groups sizes keeping the total number of individuals approximately fixed). Dashed lines represent analytical results and crosses refer to posterior estimates from simulated data (see Additional file 1). \({N}_{\mathrm{total}}\) refers to the total number of individuals