Using an incomplete block design to allocate lines to environments improves sparse genome-based prediction in plant breeding

Osval Antonio Montesinos-Lopez ABELARDO MONTESINOS LOPEZ RICARDO ACOSTA DIAZ Rajeev Varshney Jose Crossa ALISON BENTLEY (2022)

Genomic selection (GS) is a predictive methodology that trains statistical machine-learning models with a reference population that is used to perform genome-enabled predictions of new lines. In plant breeding, it has the potential to increase the speed and reduce the cost of selection. However, to optimize resources, sparse testing methods have been proposed. A common approach is to guarantee a proportion of nonoverlapping and overlapping lines allocated randomly in locations, that is, lines appearing in some locations but not in all. In this study we propose using incomplete block designs (IBD), principally, for the allocation of lines to locations in such a way that not all lines are observed in all locations. We compare this allocation with a random allocation of lines to locations guaranteeing that the lines are allocated to

the same number of locations as under the IBD design. We implemented this benchmarking on several crop data sets under the Bayesian genomic best linear unbiased predictor (GBLUP) model, finding that allocation under the principle of IBD outperformed random allocation by between 1.4% and 26.5% across locations, traits, and data sets in terms of mean square error. Although a wide range of performance improvements were observed, our results provide evidence that using IBD for the allocation of lines to locations can help improve predictive performance compared with random allocation. This has the potential to be applied to large-scale plant breeding programs.

Artículo

CIENCIAS AGROPECUARIAS Y BIOTECNOLOGÍA Bayes Theorem Genome Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Models, Genetic Plant Breeding

Replication Data for: Sparse multi-trait genomic prediction under incomplete block designs

Osval Antonio Montesinos-Lopez Brandon Alejandro Mosqueda González JOSAFHAT SALINAS RUIZ Abelardo Montesinos Jose Crossa (2022)

The efficiency of genomic selection methodologies can be increased by sparse testing where a subset of materials are evaluated in different environments. Seven different multi-environment plant breeding datasets were used to evaluate four different methods for allocating lines to environments in a multi-trait genomic prediction problem. The results of the analysis are presented in the accompanying article.

Dataset

CIENCIAS AGROPECUARIAS Y BIOTECNOLOGÍA