Molecular marker-assisted selection (MAS) is currently being employed in two areas of rice breeding at the University of Arkansas Rice Research and Extension Center (RREC) in Stuttgart. Presently the objective of the program is to accelerate the development of rice cultivars with improved cooking quality and rice blast disease resistance using two well-characterized molecular markers. A co-domi...

High yield and superior quality are the main objectives of rice breeding research. While innovations in have increased production to meet growing demand, universal issue balancing high susperior has led a lack focus on improving quality. With rising living standards, become increasingly important. Rice grain is complex trait influenced by both genetic environmental factors, with four primary as...

In genome-based prediction there is considerable uncertainty about the statistical model and method required to maximize prediction accuracy. For traits influenced by a small number of quantitative trait loci (QTL), predictions are expected to benefit from methods performing variable selection [e.g., BayesB or the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO)] compared to methods dist...

Marker-assisted selection holds promise for highly influencing tree breeding, especially for wood traits, by considerably reducing breeding cycles and increasing selection accuracy. In this study, we used a candidate gene approach to test for associations between 944 single-nucleotide polymorphism markers from 549 candidate genes and 25 wood quality traits in white spruce. A mixed-linear model ...

Rice is the staple food for more than half of the world’s population. Although rice production has doubled in the last 30 years as a result of the development of high-yield, widely adaptable, resource-responsive, semi-dwarf varieties, the threat of a food crisis remains as severe as it was 60 years ago due to the ever-increasing population, water scarcity, labor scarcity, shifting climatic cond...

Improving cooking and eating quality of rice is one of the important objectives of many breeding programs. The study of genetic diversity in specific regions of rice genome using molecular markers is an important index that can be used for the application of marker assisted selection (MAS) in rice breeding programs. In this study, 48 rice genotypes were grouped using 7 microsatellite (SSR) mark...

In livestock populations, missing genotypes on a large proportion of the animals is a major problem when implementing gene-assisted breeding value estimation for genes with known effect. The objective of this study was to compare different methods to deal with missing genotypes on accuracy of gene-assisted breeding value estimation for identified bi-allelic genes using Monte Carlo simulation. A...

Low temperature is the primary factor to affect maize sowing in early spring. It is, therefore, vital for maize breeding programs to improve tolerance to low temperatures at seed germination stage. However, little is known about maize QTL involved in low-temperature germination ability. 243 lines of the intermated B73×Mo17 (IBM) Syn4 recombinant inbred line (RIL) population was used for QTL ana...