Tracing traits to ancestral origins: streamlined pedigree visualization for efficient crop breeding

Crop breeding efficiency is enhanced when acknowledging the ancestral roots of a specific trait of interest. This quest for ancestral origins entails tracking the traitsRSQUO inheritance across closely related individuals and among successive generations. This knowledge proves to be helpful to reveal the transmission of certain alleles in both breeding programs and genetic diversity and conservation studies, particularly in unravelling the variability of highly conserved traits linked to common ancestors. These fundamental principles can be understood through pedigree-based analyses that estimate allelic probabilities based on identity by descent (IBD). However, pedigree explorations can become challenging when dealing with a large number of individuals with intricate relationships between them, a scenario often found in crop species where multi-generational crosses take place, such as in grapevine (Vitis spp.). To address this challenge, visualization tools can provide straightforward pedigree reconstruction views to enable the tracing of traits to ancestral origins in an unconvoluted way. In this work, we use an innovative, user-friendly tool designed to visualize pedigree relationships through force-graph networks. As a case study, this versatile application has been used to visualize the ancestral origins of historical phenotypic black rot (BR) resistance data in grapevine pedigrees