Varietal distinctness assisted by molecular markers : a methodological approach
Résumé
The varietal distinctness procedure involves expensive, space and time consuming measurements of phenotypical traits. Moreover, for most species and traits, interactions between genotype and environment complicate the cultivar evaluation. Molecular markers could provide a distinctness procedure that actually help increasing reliability of decisions and saving field experiments and time. In the statistical framework of the linear model, the authors propose to define a new distinctness procedure using molecular data to predict phenotypical distance between cultivars. As an example, this method is applied to maize data and leads to 29% of savings for less than 5% of errors. Improvement of these methods are finally discussed.