Genomic prediction with NetGP based on gene network and multi-omics data in plants

Genomic selection (GS) is a new breeding strategy. Generally, traditional methods are used for predicting traits based on the whole genome. However, the prediction accuracy of these models remains limited because they cannot fully reflect the intricate nonlinear interactions between genotypes and traits. Here, a novel single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) feature extraction technique based on the Pearson-Collinearity Selection (PCS) is firstly presented and improves prediction accuracy across several known models. Furthermore, gene network prediction model (NetGP) is a novel deep learning approach designed for phenotypic prediction. It utilizes transcriptomic dataset (Trans), genomic dataset (SNP) and multi-omics dataset (Trans + SNP). The NetGP model demonstrated better performance compared to other models in genomic predictions, transcriptomic predictions and multi-omics predictions. NetGP multi-omics model performed better than independent genomic or transcriptomic prediction models. Prediction performance evaluations using several other plants' data showed good generalizability for NetGP. Taken together, our study not only offers a novel and effective tool for plant genomic selection but also points to new avenues for future plant breeding research.