Plant Breeding Game

I did a training for my colleagues on plant breeding. Many of them had no exposure to the breeding process. They had learned about the Chi Scquare to determine dominance which was good, but most of them were rusty. We talked about breeding with lots of examples to help them connect to the diversity even within corn.

To finish it off, we played this Plant Breeding Game. The game was developed by someone at Cambridge. You are given a target and then you try to cross the plants to meet the target within the limited number of generations with the required matches. It is great in connecting the theory between the chi square, dominance and recessive, randomness of independent segregation, breeding choices, challenges associated with breeding for a specfic phenotype, and fixing a line. When you meet the objective, you are advanced to the next level and given an additional trait to breed for.

After the training, everyone went back to their cubicle. Some were very excited to have completed all the levels. It is always exciting when others get into the training.