Comparison of genomic-enabled cross selection criteria for the improvement of inbred line breeding populations.

A crucial step in inbred plant breeding is the choice of mating design to derive high-performing inbred varieties while also maintaining a competitive breeding population to secure sufficient genetic gain in future generations. In practice, the mating design usually relies on crosses involving the best parental inbred lines to ensure high mean progeny performance. This excludes crosses involving lower performing but more complementary parents in terms of favorable alleles. We predicted the ability of crosses to produce putative outstanding progenies (high mean and high variance progeny distribution) using genomic prediction models. This study compared the benefits and drawbacks of 7 genomic cross selection criteria (CSC) in terms of genetic gain for 1 trait and genetic diversity in the next generation. Six CSC were already published, and we propose an improved CSC that can estimate the proportion of progeny above a threshold defined for the whole mating plan. We simulated mating designs optimized using different CSC. The 835 elite parents came from a real breeding program and were evaluated between 2000 and 2016. We applied constraints on parental contributions and genetic similarities between selected parents according to usual breeder practices. Our results showed that CSC based on progeny variance estimation increased the genetic value of superior progenies by up to 5% in the next generation compared to CSC based on the progeny mean estimation (i.e. parental genetic values) alone. It also increased the genetic gain (up to 4%) and/or maintained more genetic diversity at QTLs (up to 4% more genic variance when the marker effects were perfectly estimated).

Training set optimization of genomic prediction by means of EthAcc.

Genomic prediction is a useful tool for plant and animal breeding programs and is starting to be used to predict human diseases as well. A shortcoming that slows down the genomic selection deployment is that the accuracy of the prediction is not known a priori. We propose EthAcc (Estimated THeoretical ACCuracy) as a method for estimating the accuracy given a training set that is genotyped and phenotyped. EthAcc is based on a causal quantitative trait loci model estimated by a genome-wide association study. This estimated causal model is crucial; therefore, we compared different methods to find the one yielding the best EthAcc. The multilocus mixed model was found to perform the best. We compared EthAcc to accuracy estimators that can be derived via a mixed marker model. We showed that EthAcc is the only approach to correctly estimate the accuracy. Moreover, in case of a structured population, in accordance with the achieved accuracy, EthAcc showed that the biggest training set is not always better than a smaller and closer training set. We then performed training set optimization with EthAcc and compared it to CDmean. EthAcc outperformed CDmean on real datasets from sugar beet, maize, and wheat. Nonetheless, its performance was mainly due to the use of an optimal but inaccessible set as a start of the optimization algorithm. EthAcc's precision and algorithm issues prevent it from reaching a good training set with a random start. Despite this drawback, we demonstrated that a substantial gain in accuracy can be obtained by performing training set optimization.