Genomic prediction of hybrid performance: comparison of the efficiency of factorial and tester designs used as training sets in a multiparental connected reciprocal design for maize silage.

KEY MESSAGE: Calibrating a genomic selection model on a sparse factorial design rather than on tester designs is advantageous for some traits, and equivalent for others. In maize breeding, the selection of the candidate inbred lines is based on topcross evaluations using a limited number of testers. Then, a subset of single-crosses between these selected lines is evaluated to identify the best hybrid combinations. Genomic selection enables the prediction of all possible single-crosses between candidate lines but raises the question of defining the best training set design. Previous simulation results have shown the potential of using a sparse factorial design instead of tester designs as the training set. To validate this result, a 363 hybrid factorial design was obtained by crossing 90 dent and flint inbred lines from six segregating families. Two tester designs were also obtained by crossing the same inbred lines to two testers of the opposite group. These designs were evaluated for silage in eight environments and used to predict independent performances of a 951 hybrid factorial design. At a same number of hybrids and lines, the factorial design was as efficient as the tester designs, and, for some traits, outperformed them. All available designs were used as both training and validation set to evaluate their efficiency. When the objective was to predict single-crosses between untested lines, we showed an advantage of increasing the number of lines involved in the training set, by (1) allocating each of them to a different tester for the tester design, or (2) reducing the number of hybrids per line for the factorial design. Our results confirm the potential of sparse factorial designs for genomic hybrid breeding.