In order to deliver higher rates of genetic gain and variety turnover, breeding programs targeting low- to middle-income countries must adopt standard best practices in breeding scheme design in order to enable a continuous process of optimization to deliver on breeding targets (product profiles).
The CGIAR Excellence in Breeding Platform has developed this series of practical and conceptual manuals to set a common terminology and conceptual framework to visualize the main steps in a breeding process.
Breeding as a process
Contents
Trait and diversity pipelines
A. Managing diversity
1. Germplasm and trait introgression
Breeding pipelines
A. Evaluation decisions
1. Heritability: Meaning and computation
B. Selection decisions
1. Estimating surrogates of genetic value
3. Selection indices (practical guidelines)
4. Using a desired gains index for multi-trait selection with BLUPs
5. Using a desired gains index for multi-trait selection with BLUEs
Field trials
A. Design and analysis
Program performance indicators
A. Genetic gain
1. Genetic gain as a high-level key performance indicator
See also: Webinar on Rate of response to selection (genetic gain)
See also: Cheatsheet on realized genetic gain
See also: Cheatsheet on predicted genetic gain
Scripts and datasets
The simulated data sets and R scripts to recreate the analysis mentioned in any of the “how to” manuals can be found in the Excellence in Breeding (EiB) GitLab page:
https://gitlab.com/excellenceinbreeding/module2
