Visualizing Genetic Transmission Patterns in Plant Pedigrees

Plant breeders require a number of varied data types in order to choose suitable plant lines for subsequent breeding generations. This is to ensure that characteristics of agricultural importance are maintained and improved in commercial varieties. With recent technological advances, the ability to generate large experimental datasets is both cheaper and easier, leading to problems for end users in data handling and visualization. The ability to pull these data together and visualize in an integrated system using a pedigree based structure will allow breeders and researchers to make more efficient decisions relating to which crosses to perform in order to develop new plant varieties saving both time and money in breeding programmes. After examination of current techniques for the display of phenotypic, genotypic and pedigree based data we have utilised a large and unique set of experimental barley data in order to develop a prototype system. This system represents pedigrees as mathematical graphs and utilises node size, shape and colour and various edge attributes to overlay genotypic and phenotypic data on complex, large (>1000 lines) plant pedigrees. These tools have been developed for the plant community and are freely available for end users to download and use from our website http://bioinf.hutton.ac.uk.