Public and private breeders of commodity crops such as maize and soybeans have long used sophisticated bioinformatics, statistical tools and "big data" to guide their breeding programs. These tools increasingly leverage detailed DNA sequence information to predict the performance of each crop’s breeding lines — and ultimately help breeders release improved varieties more quickly.But these sophisticated, expensive breeding tools have not been available to breeders of smaller-scale specialty crops. So, specialty crop breeding has relied heavily upon field observations (phenotyping) and the breeder's individual knowledge and experience in making crosses and selecting (or discarding) progeny. Specialty crop breeding has been as much of an art as a science.
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