Many thousands and, in some cases, millions of individuals from the major crop and livestock species have been genotyped and phenotyped for the purpose of genomic selection. ‘Ultimate genotypes’, in which the marker allele haplotypes with the most favorable effects on a target trait or traits in the population are combined together in silico, can be constructed from these datasets. Ultimate genotypes display up to six times the performance of the current best individuals in the population, as demonstrated for net profit in dairy cattle (incorporating a range of economic traits), yield in wheat and 100-seed weight in chickpea. However, current breeding strategies that aim to assemble ultimate genotypes through conventional crossing take many generations. As a hypothetical thought piece, here, we contemplate three future pathways for rapidly achieving ultimate genotypes: accelerated recombination with gene editing, direct editing of whole-genome haplotype sequences and synthetic biology.

为了进行基因组选择，已经对来自主要作物和牲畜物种的数千甚至数百万个体进行了基因分型和表型分析。“终极基因型”，其中对种群中的目标性状或性状具有最有利影响的标记等位基因单倍型以计算机模拟方式组合在一起，可以从这些数据集中构建。终极基因型显示的性能是当前种群中最佳个体的六倍，奶牛的净利润（包括一系列经济性状）、小麦的产量和鹰嘴豆的 100 粒种子重量都证明了这一点。然而，当前旨在通过传统杂交组装最终基因型的育种策略需要许多代人。作为一个假设的思想文章，在这里，我们考虑了快速实现最终基因型的三种未来途径：通过基因编辑加速重组、全基因组单倍型序列的直接编辑和合成生物学。