design matrices in MCMCglmm

Dear all,

I am working on estimating maternal effects (genetic and environmental)
with MCMCglmm that is new for me.

I am trying to apply to MCMCglmm what is shown in online Muir's course
notes made for SAS. Leanning on Henderson?s Mixed Model Equation, these
notes explain how to solve MME to predict random effects ?by hand?.

Here is my concern:

I do not know how to extract the design matrices for a MCMCglmm model,
e.g. the relatedness matrix or the one for maternal genetic effects. I
want that to understand how the design matrices are constructed by
comparing them to what they are supposed to look like.  For instance,
the design matrix for maternal genetic effects should relate offspring
to all the individuals that are in the pedigree, whereas the design
matrix for maternal environmental effects should just relate offspring
to their mothers. Does such a difference exist when MCMCglmm constructs
its design matrices? If not, how to include such different matrices in
models?


Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!


Alexandre

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]