Plant Breeding Towards Goals

Goes along my agriculture and botany threads.    Some exiting things happening in this space.  Most recently my interests have been in horticultural innovation, but the applications are broad.

Professor Thomas Bjorkman studies broccoli in a field Software Helps Plant Breeders Bring Out
Their Best

Cornell Chronicle (NY)
By Melanie Lefkowitz

Cornell University researchers have developed a software program based on a statistical method to standardize evaluations of broccoli, to make plant-breeding decisions more consistent and efficient. Breeders can use the open source RateRvaR software to select desired traits and ask multiple people to perform the same evaluation; the program analyzes that data to determine which traits are more or less important in predicting overall quality. The software also can identify traits that do not seem relevant to overall quality, so breeders can collect less data and still get accurate results. Said Cornell researcher Zachary Stansell, "This approach can standardize evaluations and make them faster and more efficient, and it can also reveal individual biases in how a human might respond to a particular variety of a vegetable or plant."  .....