Design of training populations for selective phenotyping in genomic prediction

Phenotyping is the current bottleneck in plant breeding, especially because next-generation sequencing has decreased genotyping cost more than 100.000 fold in the last 20 years. Therefore, the cost of phenotyping needs to be optimized within a breeding program. When designing the implementation of genomic selection scheme into the breeding cycle, breeders need to select the optimal method for (1) selecting training populations that maximize genomic prediction accuracy and (2) to reduce the cost of phenotyping while improving precision. In this article, we compared methods for selecting training populations under two scenarios: Firstly, when the objective is to select a training population set (TRS) to predict the remaining individuals from the same population (Untargeted), and secondly, when a test set (TS) is first defined and genotyped, and then the TRS is optimized specifically around the TS (Targeted). Our results show that optimization methods that include information from the test set (targeted) showed the highest accuracies, indicating that apriori information from the TS improves genomic predictions. In addition, predictive ability enhanced especially when population size was small which is a target to decrease phenotypic cost within breeding programs.