2018 ASHS Annual Conference

Breeders Toolbox, initially created as part of the RosBREED program, provided a system to manage pedigree, phenotypic, and genotypic data from a breeding program. As breeding programs have begun to use information on large-effect trait loci and genome-wide predictions for selection of parents, seedlings, and advanced selections, the breeders toolbox is being extended into the Tripal platform as Breeding Information Management System (BIMS) to incorporate new types and amounts of genetic data, as well as to allow breeders to manage their own data. Horticultural tree crop breeding programs tend to be locally focused and there has generally been limited evaluation of the suitability of advanced selections across a broad range of target commercial environments. We propose to extend functionality of this publicly funded Tripal BIMS to support the evaluation of environmental stability of germplasm on a global scale, initially for horticultural crops. Our hypothesis is that a particular phenotype of an individual is a sample of its response to the environment to which it has been exposed, and SNP genotyping can track replicated genomic segments across otherwise unconnected germplasm trials. Our vision is that data from different sources can be compiled into an anonymous database that individual users can interact with to input genotype and phenotypic data and output performance predictions across the range of environments in the dataset.