Thoughts and Examples of Turbocharging the Gene Banks with Genomic Prediction

Exploiting the potential of plant accessions stored in gene banks is a long term task. Current genomic and analytic technologies are enabling us to design an integrated strategy to mine this natural heritage. In a recent proof-of-concept study, we demonstrated that genomic prediction can be leveraged in a broad germplasm evaluation process. With a set of 962 biomass sorghum accessions as the reference set, we showed that a high prediction accuracy for biomass yield can be achieved. On the other hand, a modest prediction accuracy was observed for an independent validation set, as was suggested by the prediction reliability measurement. Many challenges still exist in designing a global, cost-effective strategy to assess the vast amount of valuable germplasm archived in 1,750 gene banks. But encouraging research findings also exist to provide potential solutions to population structure, adaptation, environment classification, genotype by environment interaction, sampling optimization, and bioinformatics.