Explaining my breeding work

I was in a meeting with engineers, architects and other non-breeding people and had to quickly explain how breeding works. In summary:

We want to change the average for multiple traits in our population, so the population is more valuable. We often also want to reduce variability when we commercially deploy our material. How do we do this?

1. Define traits to breed for (and their relative economic importance)
2. Select superior individuals to maximise the value defined by 1
3. Mate (cross) superior individuals
4. Evaluate the crosses
5. Once in a while review 1

Steps 2-4 are a loop called recurrent selection.

There are biological differences if you’re working with trees, cows or potatoes, but the overall process is very similar.

“But I work in genomics!” you could say. OK, you work in steps 2 & 4. Same thing for the person using phenotypic information. “But I use drones to fly LiDAR to phenotype whatever!” Ditto. Your data ends up being used by a quantitative geneticist in one of those steps, etc.

People could easily understand the description because, at the end of the day, it is a simple process.

You want more explanations like this one?

• Why did my breeding values go down?

• The breeder’s equation