plant breeding can be made more efficient by having fewer, better crosses植物育种可以通过更少的更有效,更好的跨越.pdfVIP

Witcombe et al. BMC Plant Biology 2013, 13:22 /1471-2229/13/22 RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Plant breeding can be made more efficient by having fewer, better crosses John R Witcombe1*, Sanjaya Gyawali2,5, Madhu Subedi3,6, Daljit S Virk1 and Krishna D Joshi4 Abstract Background: Crop yields have to increase to provide food security for the world’s growing population. To achieve these yield increases there will have to be a significant contribution from genetic gains made by conventional plant breeding. However, the breeding process is not efficient because crosses made between parental combinations that fail to produce useful varieties consume over 99% of the resources. Results: We tested in a rice-breeding programme if its efficiency could be improved by using many fewer, but more judiciously chosen crosses than usual. In a 15-year programme in Nepal, with varietal testing also in India and Bangladesh, we made only six crosses that were stringently chosen on complementary parental performance. We evaluated their success by the adoption and official release of the varieties they produced. We then modelled optimum cross number using assumptions based on our experimental results. Four of the six crosses succeeded. This was a fifty-fold improvement over breeding programmes that employ many crosses where only about one, or fewer, crosses in 200 succeed. Based on these results, we modelled the optimum number of crosses by assuming there would be a decline in the reliability of the breeder’s prediction of the value of each cross as more crosses were made (because there is progressively less information on the traits of the parents). Fewer-cross programmes were more likely to succeed and did so using fewer resources. Making more crosses reduced the overall probability of success of the breeding programme. Conclusio