ABSTRACT
Genomic selection - the prediction of breeding values using DNA polymorphisms - is a disruptive method that has widely been adopted by animal and plant breeders to increase crop, forest and livestock productivity and ultimately secure food and energy supplies. It improves breeding schemes in different ways, depending on the biology of the species and genotyping and phenotyping constraints. However, both genomic selection and classical phenotypic selection remain difficult to implement because of the high genotyping and phenotyping costs that typically occur when selecting large collections of individuals, particularly in early breeding generations. To specifically address these issues, we propose a new conceptual framework called phenomic selection, which consists of a prediction approach based on low-cost and high-throughput phenotypic descriptors rather than DNA polymorphisms. We applied phenomic selection on two species of economic interest (wheat and poplar) using near-infrared spectroscopy on various tissues. We showed that one could reach accurate predictions in independent environments for developmental and productivity traits and tolerance to disease. We also demonstrated that under realistic scenarios, one could expect much higher genetic gains with phenomic selection than with genomic selection. Our work constitutes a proof of concept and is the first attempt at phenomic selection; it clearly provides new perspectives for the breeding community, as this approach is theoretically applicable to any organism and does not require any genotypic information.