A comparative analysis of genomic and phenomic predictions of growth-related traits in 3-way coffee hybrids.

Abstract

Genomic prediction has revolutionized crop breeding despite remaining issues of transferability of models to unseen environmental conditions and environments. Usage of endophenotypes rather than genomic markers leads to the possibility of building phenomic prediction models that can account, in part, for this challenge. Here, we compare and contrast genomic prediction and phenomic prediction models for 3 growth-related traits, namely, leaf count, tree height, and trunk diameter, from 2 coffee 3-way hybrid populations exposed to a series of treatment-inducing environmental conditions. The models are based on 7 different statistical methods built with genomic markers and ChlF data used as predictors. This comparative analysis demonstrates that the best-performing phenomic prediction models show higher predictability than the best genomic prediction models for the considered traits and environments in the vast majority of comparisons within 3-way hybrid populations. In addition, we show that phenomic prediction models are transferrable between conditions but to a lower extent between populations and we conclude that chlorophyll a fluorescence data can serve as alternative predictors in statistical models of coffee hybrid performance. Future directions will explore their combination with other endophenotypes to further improve the prediction of growth-related traits for crops.

Plant phenotyping relevance

クロロフィル蛍光データを用いたフェノミック予測モデルを構築・比較し、成長形質の予測性能と条件間・集団間の転移性を評価しているため、植物フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's Data availability statement explicitly states that all code and datasets (including the ChlF phenomic data and growth-trait phenotypes used for GP/PP modeling) are freely available at the authors' public GitHub repository https://github.com/alainmbebi/GP-PP, which matches an allowed URL. Other URLs (BGLR CR