Abstract
Complementation of deleterious alleles has long been proposed as a major contributor to the hybrid vigor observed in the offspring of inbred parents. We test this hypothesis using evolutionary measures of sequence conservation to ask whether incorporating information about putatively deleterious alleles can inform genomic selection (GS) models and improve phenotypic prediction. We measured a number of agronomic traits in both the inbred parents and hybrids of an elite maize partial diallel population and re-sequenced the parents of the population. Inbred elite maize lines vary for more than 500,000 putatively deleterious sites, but show less genetic load than a comparable set of inbred landraces. Our modeling reveals widespread evidence for incomplete dominance at these loci, and supports theoretical models that more damaging variants are usually more recessive. We identify haplotype blocks using an identity-by-decent (IBD) analysis and perform genomic prediction analyses in which we weight blocks on the basis of segregating putatively deleterious variants. Cross-validation results show that incorporating sequence conservation in genomic selection improves prediction accuracy for yield and several other traits as well as heterosis for those traits. Our results provide strong empirical support for an important role for incomplete dominance of deleterious alleles in explaining heterosis and demonstrate the utility of incorporating functional annotation in phenotypic prediction and plant breeding.
