Last week, Brent attended the 14th annual national Sclerotinia initiative meeting (Minneapolis, MN) and gave a talk on our lab’s related Sclerotinia project. The title of his talk was “Using genomic selection to optimize prediction of Sclerotinia and agronomic phenotypes for more efficient breeding”.
The primary goal of the Sclerotinia project is to better balance the intensity and efficiency of selection for Sclerotinia resistance and other agronomic traits, and to make more breeding progress per generation on all traits relative to their actual value to the producer. In collaboration with the Dr. Nolan C. Kane lab at the University of Colorado, we employ genomic selection (GS), a new statistical technology, to achieve this goal. In the talk, Brent presented that we have conducted resequencing of all 2009 to current experimental inbred lines from the USDA sunflower breeding program that have both yield and Sclerotinia resistance data. We have also developed a relational database system (mySQL) that will allow us easy access to nursery, field phenotyping trial, and genomic datasets to conduct model fitting. In the next several months, we will use the phenotypic and genotypic data to perform the preliminary analysis for each line.
To learn more about the project, please refer to the poster below! Further updates on our lab will be posted shortly, including an update on our lab’s new and exciting database solution.
http://hulkelab.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Scl-poster-16-Brent-Hulke.pdf