New Breeding Technologies: A Good Investment Or Not?

Many technologies are available to breeders to help them improve the efficiency of their selection programs. Among the newer technologies are marker assisted selection, genomics, and physiological selection. But does the investment on these technologies pay off in the end? Researchers John Brennan and Peter Martin at the Australian Wagga Wagga Agricultural Institute say it does.

Brennan and Martin presented comparative economic analyses between conventional breeding and that which uses new technologies in their paper published in Euphytica. They presented cases where the use of new technologies can help increase the returns on investment in breeding programs by reducing associated costs during varietal development, such as labor cost or direct inputs.

The researchers cited the potential benefits that breeding programs can gain from molecular markers as well as from adopting an indirect selection system using physiological indices. An economic assessment of phenotypic evaluation versus the use of molecular markers showed that the latter can offer lower costs especially under high-throughput systems. Their estimates on the cost of line evaluation range from $8 to $16 when using molecular markers and $2 to $163 when phenotypic evaluation is employed.

For more information, the paper can be accessed by subscribers at http://www.springerlink.com/content/x618j83872px7217/.