Genomic Prediction in Barley

Genomic prediction uses markers (SNPs) across the whole genome to predict individual breeding values at an early growth stage potentially before large scale phenotyping. One of the applications of genomic prediction in plant breeding is to identify the best individual candidate lines to contribute to next generation. The main goal of this study was to see the potential of using genomic prediction in a commercial Barley breeding program. The data used in this study was from Nordic Seed company which is located in Denmark. Around 350 advanced lines were genotyped with 9K Barely chip from Illumina. Traits used in this study were grain yield, plant height and heading date. Heading date is number days it takes after 1^st June for plant to head. Heritabilities were 0.33, 0.44 and 0.48 for yield, height and heading, respectively for the average of nine plots. The GBLUP model was used for genomic prediction. To validate the genomic prediction accuracy leave one out cross-validation was performed. The accuracy was the correlation between corrected phenotype for fixed effect and averaged across plots and breeding values predicted from the genomic model. The accuracies were 0.49 (yield), 0.55 (height) and 0.64 (height). The results showed the high potential of using the genomic prediction in barley breeding programs.