Identifying QTLs in Plant Breeding Populations with Adaptive Mixed LASSO

• Activity Number: 30
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 1, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Dong Wang*+ and Kent M. Eskridge and Jose Crossa
• Companies: University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Nebraska-Lincoln and International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center
• Keywords: adaptive mixed LASSO ; plant breeding ; QTL mapping ; shrinkage estimation ; wheat

Abstract

There has been heightened interest in performing association mapping in important crop species. However, the prevailing method, mixed linear model, has been mostly limited to single marker analysis. We report the development of the adaptive mixed LASSO method that can incorporate a large number of predictors while simultaneously accounting for the population structure. Our results show that the adaptive mixed LASSO method is very promising in modeling multiple genetic effects (main QTL effects and epistasis) as well as modeling gene by environment interactions when a large number of markers are available and the population structure cannot be ignored. Applications to wheat breeding programs has been planned with the potential of influencing plant breeding practices.