Resource Allocation for Maximizing Prediction Accuracy and Genetic Gain of Genomic Selection in Plant Breeding: A Simulation Experiment

Allocating resources between population size and replication affects both genetic gain through phenotypic selection and quantitative trait loci detection power and effect estimation accuracy for marker-assisted selection (MAS). It is well known that because alleles are replicated across individuals in quantitative trait loci mapping and MAS, more resources should be allocated to increasing population size compared with phenotypic selection. Genomic selection is a form of MAS using all marker information simultaneously to predict individual genetic values for complex traits and has widely been found superior to MAS. No studies have explicitly investigated how resource allocation decisions affect success of genomic selection. My objective was to study the effect of resource allocation on response to MAS and genomic selection in a single biparental population of doubled haploid lines by using computer simulation. Simulation results were compared with previously derived formulas for the calculation of prediction accuracy under different levels of heritability and population size. Response of prediction accuracy to resource allocation strategies differed between genomic selection models (ridge regression best linear unbiased prediction [RR-BLUP], BayesC pi) and multiple linear regression using ordinary least-squares estimation (OLS), leading to different optimal resource allocation choices between OLS and RR-BLUP. For OLS, it was always advantageous to maximize population size at the expense of replication, but a high degree of flexibility was observed for RR-BLUP. Prediction accuracy of doubled haploid lines included in the training set was much greater than of those excluded from the training set, so there was little benefit to phenotyping only a subset of the lines genotyped. Finally, observed prediction accuracies in the simulation compared well to calculated prediction accuracies, indicating these theoretical formulas are useful for making resource allocation decisions.