Maize Breeding 101: New Tools and Techniques
2022
- Department of Agronomy, UW Madison
Project Media
Maize (Zea mays L.) yields have risen continuously since the adoption of hybrid maize in the US in the 1930s. About 50 to 60% of this increase has been attributed to genetic improvement with the remainder being credited to advances in crop protection, fertilization and other cultural practices.
Modern maize breeding programs are designed based on advances in genetics, biometry and experimental design and they usually demand large amounts of genomic and phenotypic data to pursue these goals. With the rapid decrease in sequencing technologies costs, there has been a recent “bottlenecking” in the acquisition and analysis of phenotypic data in the breeder’s pipeline. This situation has brought this new science of “phenomics” to the forefront of plant breeding.
The first part of this talk will provide a broad overview of the progress of maize yield in the last 100 years focusing on plant traits that have changed significantly as a response to selection affecting directly or indirectly grain yield (as yield components). The second part will emphasize how critical it is to obtain high throughput measurements of phenotypes to achieve genetic gain in modern breeding. Four examples of recent technologies delivered by academic research laboratories will be addressed: (1) A method for computing maize ear, cob and kernel attributes automatically from images (2) A system for automated image-based phenotyping of maize tassels, (3) High throughput non-destructive prediction of maize kernel composition and morphology measurements using an NIR flatbed scanner and (4) The use unmanned aerial systems to predict plant height and its relationship with yield.