Comparative study between phenotypic and genomic analyses aimed at choosing parents for hybridization purposes

Abstract

The development of superior cultivars involves parents with superiority for the traits of interest and wide genetic variability. Efficient plant breeding and selection strategies that allow for the identification of superior genotypes are essential in breeding programs. This work aims to carry out a comparative study between several strategies for choosing parents, for hybridization purposes, based on phenotypic analysis and molecular information. To obtain the phenotypic and genotypic information of the parents, data simulation was used. For genotyping, 2000 single nucleotide polymorphism markers were used, and from all possible gametes to be formed (22000), 5000 were randomly sampled to form each of the 100 individuals of the population of recombinant inbred strains. To obtain the phenotypic information, five characteristics with different levels of complexity were simulated. The comparative study was carried out using data referring to simulated genotypic values of hybrids and parents. Then, aiming to choose the parents destined for hybridization, different traditional selection strategies based on phenotypic analysis and the genome-wide selection methodology were approached. The genomic information resulted in the choice of the best lines and in obtaining superior hybrids when compared with traditional methodologies. The inclusion of the genomic genetic values of the parents in determining the crosses to be carried out increases the probability of generating phenotypically superior hybrids. Thus, the traditional methods of choosing parents for hybridization purposes are effective, but when incorporating the information from genome-wide selection, the choice of parents provides superior and promising results.