Breeding Convergence

Some 6 months ago I was contacted out of the blue by Wallace Cowling (*), who asked me if I could be an external examiner for a PhD thesis on pea breeding. I love eating pulses: chickpeas with smoked pork hocks (yum), lentils in all their forms, …, but that was my whole knowledge of pea production and breeding. But I am a sucker for interesting problems, so I said yes.

Some months later I received a copy of the thesis and two things happened: 1. the introduction chapters were very good and I got my head around the peculiarities of pea breeding programmes, and 2. for some years already there has been a convergence of breeding programmes, which makes jumping between species a relatively easy task.

I studied forestry but when I became interested in breeding I went knocking the door at the Department of Animal Science in my campus. I took classes with Ximena Garcia, who was an expert in breeding small animals. In my first job in the Chilean tree breeding programme I started playing with animal (individual tree) models, for which I had to read papers about animals. Later I did my PhD in the Department of Animal Science at Massey University (and had to learn weird words like ‘heifers’), which I later applied to trees. Some years later, I was supervising a PhD in potato breeding, where Mark Paget was running Factor Analytic models and Bayesian analyses. In between I was collaborating with people studying the genetics of squid personality and exploring conservation options for threatened species using flies to quickly model generations. You guessed, we were using multivariate animal models.

There are obvious biological differences between species, but all of the analyses will model the mean and account for non-genetic effects (with or without an experimental design), account for a pedigree (with or without using genetic markers) and, if things start getting too complicated, model covariance structures. There are deviations from this, of course, but it means that wherever you started your journey (forestry in my case) it is possible to get your head around a different production system. Well, IF you are willing to open your mind to the peculiarities of your ’new’ species and production system.

(*) We academics tend to do this, as we are looking for people who were not involved in the project to act as external evaluators. Dr Felipe Castro Urrea passed his evaluation with flying colours, with an excellent thesis and defense.