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Genomic Resources for Breeding in Alfalfa: Availability, Utility, and Adoption

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The Alfalfa Genome

Part of the book series: Compendium of Plant Genomes ((CPG))

Abstract

Alfalfa breeding still relies predominantly on recurrent phenotypic selection and breeder’s experience, but the adoption of breeding strategies relying on genomics information is gaining momentum quickly as tools and knowledge become more accessible. To accelerate alfalfa improvement using genomics, the community needs to establish reliable marker sets that track parental relationships, as well as provide affordable, repeatable genotyping methods to move towards marker assisted selection and genomic selection. However, access to genomic resources is not sufficient to make genotype-based selections. It is crucial that breeders capture phenotypes widely (across desirable and undesirable individuals) and generate such data in large quantities with high quality (not addressed in this chapter). For breeders unfamiliar or new to genomic analyses, the utilization of phenotypic and genotypic data to make decisions is a knowledge gap they may not be able to bridge on their own. Therefore, a public-sector initiative has been put in place to aid breeders and hasten the adoption of new technologies, including high-throughput genotyping, to accelerate breeding and pre-breeding efforts.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Debby Samac, Mike Peel, Heathcliffe Riday, Ali Missaoui, Esteban Rios, Nevin Young, S&W Seeds, and Legacy Seeds for their contributions to the alfalfa diversity panel, and overall to the ARS alfalfa research community for the valuable discussion during the process of marker discovery and the design of the alfalfa DArTag array. We also acknowledge Kirsten Richardson and Vanessa Greenlee for the proofreading of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Breeding Insight, Cornell University, 119 CALS Surge Facility, 525 Tower Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    Maria Katherine Mejia-Guerra, Dongyan Zhao & Moira J. Sheehan

Authors
  1. Maria Katherine Mejia-Guerra
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  2. Dongyan Zhao
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  3. Moira J. Sheehan
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Correspondence to Moira J. Sheehan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. USDA-ARS, Plant Germplasm Introduction and Testing Research, Prosser, WA, USA

    Long-Xi Yu

  2. ICAR-National Institute for Plant Biotechnology, Raja Ramanna Fellow, New Delhi, India

    Chittaranjan Kole

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Mejia-Guerra, M.K., Zhao, D., Sheehan, M.J. (2021). Genomic Resources for Breeding in Alfalfa: Availability, Utility, and Adoption. In: Yu, LX., Kole, C. (eds) The Alfalfa Genome . Compendium of Plant Genomes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74466-3_11

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