Genomic Selection in Rice: Current Status and Future Prospects

Genomic selection (GS) was first developed in animal systems as a modified version of marker-assisted selection. GS gained its popularity in plant breeding very quickly due to its effectiveness in selections. It makes use of genome-wide marker effects to assign genotypic values to individuals in the population from which they are selected for improving quantitative traits. Even though, the success of GS is evidenced by several reports in many crops, its implementation in rice is still limited. Understanding the basic principle and workflow of GS may encourage rice breeders to adapt it in the rice breeding programs. A sound knowledge on predictive accuracy and factors affecting it, application of different GS models under different breeding objectives is a prerequisite before implementing it in breeding programs. In this chapter, we discuss practical applications of GS in rice breeding, integrating components of GS with other breeding programs and accounting for genotypes by environment interaction (GEI) in GS assisted rice breeding programs.