Software Selegen-REML/BLUP: A useful tool for plant breeding

Abstract

The software Selegen-REML/BLUP uses mixed models, and was developed to optimize the routine of plant breeding programs. It addresses the following plants categories: allogamous, automagous, of mixed mating system, and of clonal propagation. It considers several experimental designs, mating designs, genotype x environment interaction, experiments repeated over sites, repeated measures, progenies belonging to several populations, among other factors. The software adjusts effects, estimates variance components, genetic additive, dominance and genotypic values of individuals, genetic gain with selection, effective population size, and other parameters of interest to plant breeding. It allows testing the significance of the effects by means of likelihood ratio test (LRT) and analysis of deviance. It addresses continuous variables (linear models) and categorical variables (generalized linear models). Selegen-REML/ BLUP is friendly, easy to use and interpret, and allows dealing efficiently with most of the situations in plant breeding. It is free and available at http://www. det.ufv.br/ppestbio/corpo_docente.php under the author’s name.