GenSPaD

This collection brings together information generated as part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action project GenSPaD (Genomic Selection for Pasture Digestibility). This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 841882.

GenSPaD objective is to develop and test approaches to use DNA information to predict nutritional value in forage breeding programmes.

Breeding for improved perennial ryegrass (PRG) cultivars to support pastoral based production systems for milk and meat is critically important. Improved pasture digestibility and overall feed quality leads to an increase in animal performance. Furthermore, it has already been shown that increases in organic matter digestibility can reduce methane emissions. However, genetic gains for traits such as forage yield and quality have very much lagged behind genetic gain for agronomic traits in cereals. One reason for this is the long breeding cycle in a typical PRG breeding programme, where a single cycle of selection can take 5-6 years.

GenSPaD aims to address these challenges by using Genomic Selection (GS). GS is a form of marker assisted selection that simultaneously estimates all loci, haplotype, or marker effects across the entire genome to calculate Genomic Estimated Breeding Values (GEBVs). The main advantage that GS could offer PRG breeding is to enable multiple cycles of selection to be achieved in the same time it takes to do a single cycle of conventional selection, thereby increasing the rate of genetic gain.