Increasing the Efficiency of Breeding Without Breeding Through Phenotypic Pre-selection in Open Pollinated Progenies
Unlike classical methods used by forest tree breeders that rely on pre-determined mating designs to construct pedigreed materials for testing and selection, the concept of Breeding Without Breeding (BWB: El-Kassaby et al., 2007) was introduced to allow the assemblage of full-sib (FS) and half-sib (HS) families from seed orchards’ wind-pollinated offspring without conducting any crosses. The method relies on using highly informative molecular markers (e.g., SSRs) and pedigree reconstruction methods to unravel the genetic relationship among individual’s offspring. Fingerprinted large wind-pollinated families are required to allow the assemblage of FS and HS families with reasonable size for field testing. To maximize the method’s efficiency while minimizing methodological efforts, we propose the inclusion of phenotypic pre-selection from existing open-pollinated family tests to substantially reduce the number of fingerprinted individuals. The proposed application (merging mass selection with BWB) capitalizes on the efficiency of mass-selection in identifying groups of superior individuals and the use of pedigree reconstruction to delineate the paternal parents of the phenotypically selected individuals, hence complete pedigree tracking.
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Author(s): Yousry A. El-Kassaby, Dag Lindgren
Publication: Tree Improvement and Genetics - Southern Forest Tree Improvement Conference - 2007