Project description:
The purpose of this project is to accelerate the development of rye grass breeds that can reduce the annual excess of nitrogen from Danish grass fields and the annual emission of methane from cattle. At the same time, the improved traits of the breeds will strengthen the economy of the individual farm holding through increased milk production and through reduced fertiliser costs. Our hypothesis is that these advances can be obtained through the development of second-generation genomic selection (2GS), making it possible to predict how well two or more parent plants fit together in a crossbreeding (their combination value). Our studies (ForageSelect) have shown that GS can be implemented with a large efficiency in grass improvement, but have also revealed that with new initiatives it is possible to obtain substantially higher yields. These initiatives include calculation of combination values, integration of more layers of information in the individual improvement lines (genomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics profiling), as well as development of add-ons taking GxE
