P1123Usefulness of Crop Models to Characterize Environmental Conditions in Genomic Predictions of Genotype-by-Environment Interactions in Wheat
The challenge of predicting genotype-by-environment interactions requires that both genotypes and environments can be split in predictable components.
In the literature genomic selection models have been developed to use molecular markers to predict "main" breeding values and have been recently extended to include GxE interactions.
Furthermore, environmental characterization work has focused on modeling plant stresses so that GxE interaction can be seen as a genotypic response to a stress, in particular to water stress. Some stress indicators have been defined as the impact of a stress due to the climate and the soil water at a precise developmental stage of the crop. Another type of stress indicators results from crop model, i.e., a simulation of a crop development integrating day by day climatic, soil and management constraints. Among these indicators, our work aims at testing whether the integrative crop modeling could be used to characterize environmental conditions in analyzing genotypic response to water stress, in comparison with the direct use of climate/soil data. We propose here to study in wheat the advantages of using a crop model to characterize water stress in a framework of mixed model factorial regression.