Abstract
Studies that incorporate economic aspects of plant breeding into the evaluation of selection strategies tend to focus on a specific example. This makes it difficult to generalize the conditions under which one strategy is more cost-effective than the other. We provide a general, average cost framework for quantifying the effects of genomic selection prediction accuracy and varying cost ratios of phenotyping to genotyping on the economic performance of genomic selection relative to traditional phenotypic selection. We assess prediction accuracy as a stochastic function of trait heritability, population-specific effective number of chromosome segments underlying a trait, and training population size. In addition, we set up an analytical method for determining the economically optimal size of the training population under varying cost scenarios for traits that differ with respect to heritability. The results provide quantitative estimates of the economic performance of genomic selection under a wide range of scenarios. The benefits of increasing the training population size beyond the typical size of 400 lines tend to be higher for traits with heritability below 0.1 and for populations with the effective number of chromosome segments above 100. Genomic selection may offer promising economic advantages, but only for traits with heritability roughly below 0.25, unless the per-line cost of phenotyping is higher than the genotyping cost, and the effective number of chromosome segments is smaller than about 100. The model can be used for preliminary economic assessment of genomic selection, and it can be expanded to account for subjective risk preferences of plant breeders.
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Notes
Farid (2015) shows that broad sense heritability for a number of quantitative traits in the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), including seed yield, nitrogen fixation, flowering (days), maturity (days), seed protein content, leaf chlorophyll concentration, carbon isotope discrimination, resistance to common bacterial blight, can often be lower than 0.25. Our model design was in part based on a common bean breeding program but its applicability can be generalized across species.
In addition, cost-based optimization when multiple traits are selected simultaneously is a potential extension of our model. In this case, genetic gain for different traits would need to be combined into a single genetic gain index by applying a weighting function.
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Funding for this research was provided by the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, Ontario Research Fund: Research Excellence program. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewer whose comments greatly improved the paper.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
First and second partial derivatives of the squared prediction accuracy function (\(r_{{jN_{j} }}^{2}\)) with respect to the size of the training population, N j heritability, \(h_{j}^{2}\), and the effective numbers of chromosome segments, M.
Since we are interested only in the signs of the derivatives, for simplicity, we use \(r_{{jN_{j} }}^{2}\) rather than \(r_{{jN_{j} }}\) to derive the first and second derivatives. \(r_{{jN_{j} }}^{2}\) is a monotonically increasing transformation of \(r_{{jN_{j} }}\), so the signs of the first derivatives of the two function are the same. If the second derivative of \(r_{{jN_{j} }}^{2}\) is negative, the second derivative of \(r_{{jN_{j} }}\) must also be negative. Only in the case of a positive second derivative of \(r_{{jN_{j} }}^{2}\) the sign of the second derivative of \(r_{{jN_{j} }}\) could not be determined using this method, but none of the second derivatives of \(r_{{jN_{j} }}^{2}\) are positive.
Prediction accuracy increases with \(N_{j}\), but at a decreasing rate. This further implies diminishing returns (in terms of genetic gain) to the size of the training population. Similar to the size of the training population, the first and second derivatives of \(r_{{jN_{j} }}^{2}\) with respect to \(h_{j}^{2}\) suggest that the genetic gain response function increases at a decreasing rate with trait heritability. On the other hand, genetic gain falls at a decreasing rate as \(M\) increases.
Appendix 2: Derivation of the optimal training population size (\(N_{{Opt_{j} }}\))
Simplifying notation:
Direct link to the derivation: http://www.derivative-calculator.net/#expr = sqrt%283%2F2%29%2A%28a%2An%2Bb%29%2F%28c%2Asqrt%28n%2Ad%2F%28e%2An%2Bg%29%29%29&diffvar = n&simplify = 1&showsteps = 1
The optimal N is subject to
or
which implies solutions for the quadratic equation
or
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Rajsic, P., Weersink, A., Navabi, A. et al. Economics of genomic selection: the role of prediction accuracy and relative genotyping costs. Euphytica 210, 259–276 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10681-016-1716-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10681-016-1716-0