Construction of Mating Plans for Breeding Experiments using Generalized Incomplete Trojan-Type Designs

Abstract

Improvement in the genetic potential of plants and animals is the major objective of breeding programmes and a judicious choice of a mating plan is essential to attain the breeder’s goal. Generalized incomplete Trojan-type designs are row-column designs in which each cell, corresponding to the intersection of row and column, contains more than one treatment and the rows are incomplete. These designs can be advantageously used for obtaining mating plans, like partial diallel cross (PDC) or partial triallel cross (PTC) plans by considering treatments in the design as individual parental lines in the breeding programme and by making crosses between lines within each cell. In this paper, a method of obtaining PDC and PTC plans involving smaller number of crosses has been described using a class of generalized incomplete Trojan-type designs.