Josh Fogg (Edinburgh) – The Mathematics of Breeding Programmes

When managing a breeding programme, we want to maximize the selection of desirable traits (such as health or yield). At the same time, we know that related plants or animals are more likely to share traits, so we also need to incorporate minimizing inbreeding and its associated risks. This can be modelled as a bi-objective optimization problem, which happens to have a similar structure to portfolio theory from financial mathematics.

Collaborating with researchers at the Roslin Institute in the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, we examined how a range of mathematical tools can be used to explore this problem more accurately and efficiently than the state of the art. These were tested with simulated breeding programmes and led to the creation of an open-source tools for practitioners.