Prof Ben Hayes - Potential approaches to create ultimate genotypes in crops and livestock

Prof Ben Hayes from the University of Queensland: Many thousands and, in some cases, millions of individuals from the major crop and livestock species have been genotyped and phenotyped for the purpose of genomic selection. ‘Ultimate genotypes’, in which the marker allele haplotypes with the most favourable effects on a target trait or traits in the population are combined in silico, can be constructed from these datasets.

Ultimate genotypes display up to six times the performance of the current best individuals in the population, as demonstrated for net profit in dairy cattle (incorporating a range of economic traits), yield in wheat and 100-seed weight in chickpea. However, current breeding strategies that aim to assemble ultimate genotypes through conventional crossing take many generations.

As a hypothetical thought piece, Prof Ben Hayes, contemplates three future pathways for rapidly achieving ultimate genotypes: accelerated recombination with gene editing, direct editing of whole-genome haplotype sequences and synthetic biology.

Background:
Professor Hayes has extensive research experience in genetic improvement of livestock, crop, pasture and aquaculture species, with a focus on integration of genomic information into breeding programs, including leading many large scale projects which have successfully implemented genomic technologies in livestock and cropping industries. Author of more than 300 journal papers, including in Nature Genetics, Nature Reviews Genetics, and Science, contributing to statistical methodology for genomic, microbiome and metagenomic profile predictions, quantitative genetics including knowledge of genetic mechanisms underlying complex traits, and development of bioinformatics pipelines for sequence analysis. Thomson Reuters highly cited researcher in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.