EvoLunch Seminar: Natalia Ruzickova & Frank Technow (Corteva Agriscience)

The plant breeding company Pioneer was founded 100 years ago to put into practice the then emerging science of quantitative and population genetics. The maize gene pool (“germplasm”), that is the foundation of our success, has enabled us to deliver tremendous genetic improvements to farmers and society in the form of higher and more resilient yield performance and improved end use quality. The 100-year anniversary is a good opportunity to hypothesize why the underlying germplasm evolution model continues to be successful, despite characteristics (e.g., population stratification, severe bottlenecks) considered sub-optimal under the classical infinitesimal model of quantitative genetics. Based on concepts from quantitative and evolutionary genetics as well as complexity theory, we propose a rational for this success. Namely, that the historically grown structure of hybrid breeding programs presented an optimal search strategy in the background of genetic complexity arising from the structure and properties of interactive genetic networks. This talk will give a brief introduction to our history and what we do and then provide an overview of the theoretical and numerical framework we use to study artificial germplasm evolution in complex fitness landscapes.