Revisiting Mendel's peas in the age of genomics

If successful, Mendel’s peas could help us change the way we breed the world’s major crop plants. The concept is simple – why not breed plants as if they were animals?

Of course, we must make some adjustments for selfing plants, which include most of the world’s major food crops. Such annual crop plants normally self and set seed before we can measure important traits. Selfing upsets the 'animal model' of selection. We propose a new model for breeding of selfing plants, where selection occurs on early selfing generations, and the new model is based on the 'animal model'.

The 'animal model', when it is developed for selfing plants, will be called the 'plant model'. It has some selfing in the pedigree.

Otherwise, it is very similar to the very successful 'animal model' which shows major genetic improvements based on relationship information from relatives in the pedigree, or relationship information from whole genome markers. The latter case is called 'genomic selection'. With the 'plant model', we believe we can greatly accelerate improvements in plant breeding.

We propose a PhD project which will investigate the ability of the 'plant model' to accelerate plant breeding outcomes for complex traits, with low heritability. We will use Mendel’s peas to test this with a low heritability trait called black spot resistance. We will apply genomic information to test the improvements based on genomic selection.

For more background information, see the suggested readings below.