Visualizing Genetic Transmission Patterns in Plant Pedigrees

Plant breeders utilise a large number of varied and diverse data types in order to choose suitable plant lines for subsequent breeding generations to ensure that characteristics of agricultural importance are maintained and improved in commercially grown varieties.

With recent technological advances, the ability to generate large experimental datasets is becoming both increasingly cheaper and easier to perform. This however leads to problems in data handling and visualization for end users. The ability to merge these data together and provide appropriate visualizations using a pedigree structure based framework and supporting database backend will allow breeders and researchers to make better decisions choosing potential crosses to carry out in order to aid development of new cultivars.

After examination of current techniques for the display of phenotypic, genotypic and pedigree data we have utilised a large and unique set of experimental barley data in order to develop a prototype system and further developed this to include powerful interactive features and database integration. This system represents pedigrees as a directed acyclic graph and utilises node size, shape and colour and various edge attributes to overlay genotypic and phenotypic data on complex, large (>1000 lines) plant pedigrees.

This tool has been developed for the plant community and will soon be freely available for end users to download and use from our website http://bioinf.hutton.ac.uk.