Genomic Resources for Breeding in Alfalfa: Availability, Utility, and Adoption

Alfalfa breeding still relies predominantly on recurrent phenotypic selection and breeder’s experience, but the adoption of breeding strategies relying on genomics information is gaining momentum quickly as tools and knowledge become more accessible. To accelerate alfalfa improvement using genomics, the community needs to establish reliable marker sets that track parental relationships, as well as provide affordable, repeatable genotyping methods to move towards marker assisted selection and genomic selection. However, access to genomic resources is not sufficient to make genotype-based selections. It is crucial that breeders capture phenotypes widely (across desirable and undesirable individuals) and generate such data in large quantities with high quality (not addressed in this chapter). For breeders unfamiliar or new to genomic analyses, the utilization of phenotypic and genotypic data to make decisions is a knowledge gap they may not be able to bridge on their own. Therefore, a public-sector initiative has been put in place to aid breeders and hasten the adoption of new technologies, including high-throughput genotyping, to accelerate breeding and pre-breeding efforts.