Posts tagged breeding

• Optimal contribution HiGHS

  ༄> A new pre-print Robust Optimal Contribution Selection led by Josh Fogg.
  27 Dec, '24

• Sometimes one has to wait a long time

  While tidying up my office I found the handout that accompanied my presentation in a breeding strategy meeting, held in…
  7 Dec, '24

• Time for correlations

  A few posts ago I was talking about heritabilities (like here) and it’s time to say something about genetic correlations.…
  4 Sep, '24

• When heritability is high but the phenotype is dominated by the environment

  I was reading a LinkedIn post that said “heritability is the extent to which differences in observed phenotypes can be…
  23 Aug, '24

• Breeding trade-offs

  On one side, it is obvious what we should do: increase any of the values in the numerator (selection intensity,…
  25 Jul, '24

• Having a peek at sheep breeding

  One of the cool things about Quantitative Genetics is that it works everywhere. As a forester, I work with trees…
  9 Jul, '24

• There is value in better explanations

  I am often fascinated by people who can explain something that I already know but in a much better way.…
  30 Jun, '24

• Why are you complicating the analysis?

  Progeny trials (or progeny testing or genetic tests or whatever you call them) are a real money pit. They are…
  28 Jun, '24

• Have you visited the trials?

  I was having a chat with analysts that just had a project dumped on their lap. They were questioning previous…
  21 Jun, '24

• Breeding: simple interfaces, complex strategies

  I found this text I wrote 20 years ago(*), part of a discussion document I prepared for a review of…
  14 Jun, '24

• Why is this trait I like getting worse in the breeding programme?

  The short answer: because the trait you like is not part of the breeding objective and, therefore, has not an…
  5 Jun, '24

• Exposing rather than hiding complexity

  In the mid-1990s I was at Massey University in Palmerston North, centre of the known universe, where I was doing…
  9 May, '24

• Do you remember your first time?

  You were nervous. Would they like it as much as you did? Would you make the cut? Your first manuscript…
  16 Apr, '24

• Transforming Crop Breeding with Trait Extraction from Drone Imagery

  ༄> Quick popsci explanation of drone use in breeding.
  12 Apr, '24

• Sometimes we want more, sometimes we want less

  I am running analyses for a new article with my colleague Clemens Altaner (a smart cookie), reprocessing old samples to…
  11 Apr, '24

• All that glitters (still) is not GxE interaction

  Five months ago I was saying all that glitters is not GxE interaction, putting forward the idea that, at least…
  10 Apr, '24

• Not a miracle worker

  —The genetic correlations are very high. Can you check them? —Sure
  31 Mar, '24

• Genomic data analysis for beginners

  ༄> Video series by Gábor Mészáros on genomic data analysis.
  16 Mar, '24

• Plant image analysis

  ༄> The pliman (plant image analysis) package is designed to analyze plant images, particularly for leaf and seed analysis. It offers…
  14 Mar, '24

• Pedigree pruning

  ༄> ggroups: an R package for pedigree and genetic groups data.
  14 Mar, '24

• A few things that I expect to find in a well-functioning breeding programme

  A good understanding of the biological traits that have an effect on profit. Can we identify new, more efficient selection criteria?
  13 Mar, '24

• Genetic competition

  ༄> Good explanation on fitting competition models in forest genetic trials using asreml:
  10 Mar, '24

• Improving genomic selection

  ༄> Would data augmentation improve the performance of within-family selection in forestry datasets?
  3 Mar, '24

• Monopoly money vs real money

  “Tree breeding has added 2 Billion dollars to the forest industry” said the presenter during a seminar.
  2 Mar, '24

• More than heritability 🎶

  It is easy to get obsessed with heritabilities when you start working in breeding and genetics. The idea that a…
  5 Feb, '24

• Collaborative competition

  I was reading Peter Amer’s Pre-competitive collaboration in which he discusses the interaction between private and public sectors in research…
  23 Dec, '23

• Leaking genetic gain: not quite a selection index

  A few years ago I was talking with a breeder who spent substantial time running genetic analyses, with fairly sophisticated…
  21 Dec, '23

• Long-term and longer-term

  Last Tuesday I had a very interesting visit (coordinated by Dr Verónica Emhart) and discussion with the breeding team at…
  15 Dec, '23

• Names and things

  There was a time when we used to take one or more field crews and we would measure trees. As…
  10 Dec, '23

• Why did my breeding values go down?

  At first, the question may sound strange. You have been collecting data, running analyses using various acronyms (PBLUP, GBLUP, HBLUP,…
  30 Nov, '23

• At the core of your breeding programme

  Surely you have been in this situation: meeting, there is coffee and biscuits at the back, some fruit if you’re…
  11 Nov, '23

• From character to numeric pedigrees

  In quantitative genetic analyses we often use a pedigree to represent the relatedness between individuals, so this is accounted in…
  9 Feb, '18

• Comment on Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest

  After writing a blog post about the paper “Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest” I…
  29 Jul, '14

• The Precautionary Principle/Critique of GMOs

  Nassim Nicolas Taleb and colleagues present an (almost?) tautological view of the effect of GMO (PDF): the large areas of…
  27 Jul, '14

• A couple of thoughts on biotech and food security

  “What has {insert biotech here} done for food security?” This question starts at the wrong end of the problem, because…
  27 Feb, '14

• My take on the USA versus Western Europe comparison of GM corn

  A few days ago I came across Jack Heinemann and collaborators’ article (Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in…
  4 Jul, '13

• GM-fed pigs, chance and how research works

  Following my post on GM-fed pigs I received several comments, mostly through Twitter. Some people liked having access to an…
  21 Jun, '13

• Ordinal logistic GM pigs

  This week another ‘scary GMO cause disease’ story was doing the rounds in internet: A long-term toxicology study on pigs…
  14 Jun, '13

• Multisite, multivariate genetic analysis: simulation and analysis

  The email wasn’t a challenge but a simple question: Is it possible to run a multivariate analysis in multiple sites?…
  14 Dec, '12

• On the destruction of a trial of genetically modified pines

  The media in New Zealand briefly covered the destruction of a trial with genetically modified pines (Pinus radiata D. Don,…
  16 Apr, '12