Practice question

Pedigree breeding demands detailed documentation of ancestry, cross history, selection decisions, and progeny performance for every plant across generations. Each F2 plant is assigned a number, its selfed progeny tracked in F3 rows, superior plants again selected and numbered, building a continuous pedigree register through F6. This requires maintaining field books, maps, and phenotypic scores for traits like disease score, height, maturity, and quality across years and locations. No other method keeps such intensive genealogy; bulk method simply harvests in bulk, SSD harvests one seed per plant without notes, and mass selection pools phenotypes. Meticulous records enable breeders to trace co-ancestry, avoid close relatives, estimate segregation ratios, and revert to earlier generations if needed. The cost is high labor and storage, but it allows selection based on pedigree merit and family performance, crucial for combining multiple quantitative traits and ensuring intellectual property documentation for variety release. Modern digital breeding databases and barcoded tags improve pedigree accuracy, integrating genotypic data and image phenotyping to preserve comprehensive lineage and selection intensity records for future genomic predictions.