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)
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
