Advancing crop breeding through data linkage

By Andi Anderson

Understanding the complex relationship between environmental conditions and genetic traits is essential for developing more resilient and productive crops.

At Iowa State University, Professor Jianming Yu and his team are pioneering research into this connection, focusing on "phenotypic plasticity"—how the same plant genotype can react differently under varying conditions.

By studying how traits, genetics, and environmental factors interact, they aim to improve crop breeding methods.

Yu’s team has built a quantitative framework that helps breeders better understand how plants adapt to different environments.

Using a vast data set of corn genetics and environmental observations, the researchers studied 5,000 lines of maize across 11 locations, with over 20 million genetic markers analyzed. This framework allows them to identify key environmental factors that shape crop characteristics during critical growth stages.

The study’s results, recently published in Genome Research, show promising predictive accuracy. For example, the framework accurately forecasted flowering times for untested genotypes in new environments more than 90% of the time, although predictions for other traits were somewhat less precise.

The findings could help guide breeders in developing corn varieties with higher yields or greater resilience to environmental stresses.

Such advancements are increasingly important as climate change impacts agriculture. By analyzing large-scale data sets in real-life field conditions, breeders can gain a clearer understanding of crop resilience.

Yu’s research also points to the broader potential for applying these methods across other crop types, and their work has been shared on MaizeGDB, a public website for corn genomics, to help researchers worldwide.

This study, supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other institutions, offers crop breeders an innovative approach for tackling challenges in agriculture. Through an emphasis on natural field conditions and data linkage, this research is paving the way for more productive and resilient crops.

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