By Lindsey Berebitsky
Since civilization began, people have taken the plants with the best characteristics for themselves and their land and bred them together each season until they had rows of crops specialized for the food, material and fuel that fit their lifestyles. With the extra challenge of more plant disease and extreme weather events, plant breeding is essential to feeding, clothing and building the growing world today.
Fortunately, plant breeding has had a few innovations over the millennia. One of the greatest advancements came with the discovery of genetics, the understanding of how traits and the DNA behind them are inherited from parent to child. This scientific approach has developed over the last 50 years and has allowed plant breeders to go beyond picking crosses based on their favorite traits and to look deeper into the genes responsible for desirable attributes.
After decades of recording detailed information about different varieties of crops, their traits and the DNA sequences they hold, plant breeders have been waiting for the next innovation: a system that predicts what different crosses will yield and which varieties will best suit the regions they serve. Beck’s Hybrids, a seed company selling corn, soybeans and other seeds across the U.S. to farmers, has one such comprehensive dataset of their own corn varieties. They have been working towards predictive breeding for over a decade and recently partnered with eight Purdue professors, several graduate students and The Data Mine to build a genetic-informed prediction service for their plant breeders and farmers.
Source : purdue.edu