Genomic Selection in tree breeding workshop

The "Genomic Selection Workshop" Lecture Notes can now be downloaded HERE

You may want to bring your laptop computer to the Workshop. The Conference room provides free acccess to wi-fi high-speed internet.

On Sunday June 26 we have organized a technical workshop on the hot topic of Genomic Selection in tree breeding. This workshop will be taught by Prof. Fikret Isik and Prof. Ross Whetten, both faculty and research scientist from North Carolina State University. This workshop should be particularly interesting to all those participants interested in methods and approaches to integrate genomic technologies into applied tree breeding.

The workshop will start at 10:00 AM with three 50 minute lectures in the morning, ending at around 12:45 and resume after lunch at 14:00 with three more lectures in the afternoon, ending at 16:45. 

The workshop will take place in the main conference room.

This workshop is FREE to all registered Conference participants (i.e. you have to be registered for the IUFRO Tree Biotechnology Conference 2011 to participate in the Genomic Selection Workshop).

We are offering only 80 places and registration will be on-site on a first come, first serve basis starting at 9:00 AM at the registration desk.

The tentative program follows below:

Tentative program

Lecture 1: Exploratory marker data analysis: Managing and manipulating large marker datasets; summary statistics of minor allele frequency and proportion of missing genotypes;and error-checking and filtering marker data

Lecture 2: Imputing missing genotypes: Imputation of missing genotypes using the average genetic relationship matrix oridentity-by-descent

Lecture 3: Single marker analysis for association: Marker-trait associations using F-tests; multiple testing correction;and correcting for genetic relationships

1.5 hour Lunch Break (on your own)

Lecture 4: Introduction to genomic selection:What genomic selection is, and how it differs from other approaches. Using markers to construct realized genomic relationship matrix to use in genomic selection

Lecture 5: G-BLUP: Using the realized genomic relationship matrix in mixed models for genomic estimated breeding values

Lecture 6: Genome-wide selection:Fitting large number of markers for prediction of marker additive and dominance genetic effects;and genomic prediction of breeding values

NOTES:

• The workshop will be taught at a level appropriate for graduate students who have taken basic courses in molecular genetics,quantitative genetics and statistics.
• Each lecture will be 50 minutes long, and will include demonstration of software tools for each of the procedures. There will be ten-minute breaks between lectures.
• Lectures notes, demo data sets and programming examples will be provided on a website for workshop participants. Evening discussion groups can be organized later during the conference if workshop participants are interested in discussing specific questions about their own data.