Helping to breed better beans
Researchers from ETH Zurich and International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) show that genomic prediction is a powerful tool for selection of new bean varieties in breeding programs.
Common bean is the most important grain legume and protein source for human consumption worldwide. Beans are of particular importance for the nutrition and income of smallholder farmers in the tropics, where limiting environmental conditions such as drought or low soil fertility often exist. Current bean breeding aims to sustainably increase grain production under such challenging environmental conditions.
A new study published in Frontiers in Plant Science by a team of researchers from ETH Zurich and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) shows the potential of using genomic predictions in bean breeding programs to both increase the selection intensity and to shorten the breeding cycle.
In the study, the researchers evaluated the accuracy of genomic predictions for agronomic traits, such as the number of days to flowering, seed weight and yield, in different environments using data of the bean breeding program of CIAT. In total, 481 different bean lines were grown in twelve field trials across two locations in Colombia. The breeding lines were evaluated under drought, irrigation, and low soil phosphorous conditions, in order to optimize the prediction model across different environments.
The genomic prediction abilities of the developed model, in relation to the measured traits from the field trials, were thoroughly assessed. The results of the assessment were promising, showing how prediction accuracy could be improved by accounting for multiple environmental conditions. The authors concluded that “genomic selection can be employed to increase genetic gain through early-generation selection or by replacing costly and time-consuming phenotyping.” Such selection is useful in the development of common bean varieties adapted to future challenging conditions.
ETH Zurich postdoctoral researcher Beat Keller, first author on the study, remarks: “We showed that historical data of field trials can be used to predict the performance of new breeding lines. Such genomic estimated breeding values allow breeders to pre-select their breeding material. Only promising genotypes are tested in the field, which makes a breeding program much more efficient.“
Read the full article “Genomic Prediction of Agronomic Traits in Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) under Environmental Stress” in Frontiers in Plant Science: external pagehttps://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.01001/full
This publication is part of the WFSC funded project “Increasing genetic gain in climbing bean breeding” (IncreBean). The project has the main objective to implement methods and technologies to increase the genetic gain in bean breeding, to assist the development of improved bean varieties. Find out more on the project page