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Adaptation to competition during the evolutionary history of plants leads to a reduction of the overall group performance of plant elite material in the field. Traits related to competitive ability can be affected by the presence or absence of kin in the neighborhood. Consequently, local relatedness might reveal plant-to-plant interaction that can enhance the predictive abilities of genomic models when accounted for. However, recurrent family selection increases relatedness among all elite material and can blur the effect of relatedness on neighbors' phenotypes. To overcome this difficulty, we analyzed data from the French breeding program of Populus nigra L., where 1,452 genotypes were replicated six to eight times, each time encountering a different neighborhood. We assessed local relatedness and investigated genomic estimated breeding values on tree height and rust vulnerability with a single-step GBLUP incorporating local relatedness as a covariate. Results suggests that including local relatedness as an additional factor to GBLUP models is significantly more important for rust resistance than for tree height, mainly due to their contrasting genetic architecture - oligogenic for the former and polygenic for the latter.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
* - rewriting of the abstract, introduction, title to better match the scope of the paper. - rephrasing methods to clarify the accounting of the spatial autocorrelation effect.
* https://data.inrae.fr/privateurl.xhtml?token=b79ab1ca-ebb9-47c6-9272-1568c0c33d70.