Executive Summary : | Genomic selection and prediction have been extensively used in animal breeding and have yielded desired results. Plant scientists have recently started exploring the possibilities of genomic selection application in crop plants. Genomic selection has great potential to accelerate the breeding gains for both simple and complex traits in crop breeding. Unlike genotyping, which is now highly mechanized and essentially uniform across organisms, phenotyping is still a cottage industry, labour intensive and inevitably environmentally sensitive. The application of genomic prediction and selection would be rewarding in this scenario. Potato is one of the most important food crop in India and has complex inheritance due to auto-tetraploidy and heterozygosity. Potato breeding have relied globally on phenotypic recurrent selection resulting in low genetic gains. Genetic gain can be improved by coupling modern breeding techniques and platforms, mainly driven by molecular and genomic tools with conventional breeding. However, despite availability of potato genome sequence in 2011, the progress on genomic front is limited to few molecular markers for biotic stress resistance only. The recent innovations in the auto-tetraploid genetics including the use of SNPs with correct allele dosage has spurred the use of genomic selection and prediction in potato. The traditional way of improving potato varieties for agronomic traits and processing quality is via conventional breeding, which requires the generation of F1 progenies and their characterization phenotypically. In phenotypic selection, a large number of planting material is required to minimize sample errors. Moreover, the duration of the potato breeding cycle from sexual hybridization to incorporating new clones as parents is around 6-7 years and varietal development is 10-12 years with several difficulties in seed tuber quality maintenance. Thus, the genomic selection provides a more robust, time-saving strategy to develop nutrient-rich varieties of potato. The present proposal aims to develop genomic selection models for major agronomical and processing quality traits in autotetraploid potato to enable the screening of thousands of individuals for key quality traits at a very early stage in the breeding program, ensuring that only the most valuable material is advanced for extensive screening and phenotyping, and parents are recycled in the very early generations like F1C2 to enhance genetic gain in potato breeding in India. This will involve use of genomic selection simulation models, use of parametric (GBLUP and Bayesian) and non-parametric (machine learning models) genomic selection models using appropriate SNP genotyping platform for agronomic and nutritional quality traits, and compute the genomic prediction accuracy to demonstrate the feasibility of genomic selection in Indian potato breeding program. The genomic selection models will be exemplary to other polyploid crops. |
Co-PI: | Dr. Vijai Kishor Gupta, ICAR-Central Potato Research Institute, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh-171001, Dr. Bandana Kaundal, ICAR-Central Potato Research Institute, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, Dr. Prabina Kumar, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, New Delhi-110012 |