How Interactive Genealogy Graphs Enable to Explore a Hybrid’s Extended Family and Study the Performances of Its Members for Multiple Traits, All within RnDExpTM

When studying hybrid phenotypic and genotypic data, it is challenging to find the right graphical representations, to answer a broad range of questions. For instance: Do hybrids with a common ancestor strongly share traits?

The difficulty stems mainly from the large amount of heterogeneous data generated in a biological material’s lifecycle (breeding, testing, lab work, etc) that needs to be displayed and managed.

The completeness of these records and their connectivity down the generations are the first keys to study materials in the light of their ancestor’s performances.

Both objectives may be fulfilled by a tool enabling to explore a hybrid’s extended family on various criteria (traits, genetic identity, location, molecular marking…). Such a tool would display a hybrid’s family tree in an interactive genealogy graph including its direct parents, origin line, origin parents, and every related hybrid sharing a common ancestor, so doing it would help fully grasp the relations between materials of interest. Furthermore, it would be useful to access deeper level analysis (Dispersion graph, PCA, Distance matrix, Component analysis, etc) by selecting subgroups of the displayed materials.

In this poster we will study the benefits of a visualization tool from RnDExp™ software in a user case scenario, where one wishes to mine the ancestral data of selected hybrids, helping to optimize which hybrids and parental lines should be included in next season’s trials and crosses, to further breeding objectives and to increase the genetic diversity.