When more is better: how data sharing would accelerate genomic selection of crop plants

Abstract

Genomic selection is proving an effective new strategy for increasing breeding efficiency in a wide variety of cereal species – the staple crops that feed the world. A preponderance of studies, reviewed here, has confirmed that the more correlated phenotypic and environmental data that are used to feed genomics-assisted breeding models, the better the prediction accuracies of the models and the more useful the breeding outcomes. We argue that based on these empirical results, new alliances to share data across genomic selection breeding programs are critical to the rapid development and deployment of new crop varieties.