Efficient Breeding by Genomic Mating

Abstract

Many breeders use selection as a first step for improvement of complex traits. The theory of selection is well studied in the genetics literature. In this article, we propose a new approach to breeding which focuses on mating instead of selection, we refer it to as genomic mating. We believe breeding by genomic mating uses the genomic information better than a recently proposed method of breeding methodologies like genomic selection. We used concepts of risk and diversification from the economics for formulating the optimum mating theory. The results from our simulations point to the efficiency of our method to selection based breeding.