HOW WELL ARE THE PREDICTED BREEDING VALUES OF PARENTAL CLONES ASSOCIATED WITH FAMILY PERFORMANCE IN THE BSES-CSIRO SUGARCANE BREEDING PROGRAM?

IN THE BSES-CSIRO sugarcane breeding program, breeders are using predicted breeding values to determine which clones are selected as parents, which crosses are made, and which families are entered into regional selection programs via progeny assessment trials (PATs). By doing so, we expect that parents with higher predicted breeding values will produce higher-performing families and a higher proportion of superior individual clones. In this paper we present results from three series of PATs to investigate the relationship between predicted breeding value of female and male parents, and their mid-parent value, and the performance of their progeny for cane yield (TCH) and sugar content (CCS). Mid-parent predicted breeding values were highly significantly associated with family performance for both TCH and CCS. Over the three series of PATs they explained about 19% of the family mean variation in TCH and about 23% in CCS. Single parent predicted breeding values explained about half of the variation that mid-parent predicted breeding values explained. No different association was found between female and male predicted parent breeding values.