On October 19, Ed Buckler and postdocs Brandon Monier and Guillaume Ramstein, presented a class at the Cereal Genomics Workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. With an emphasis on maize, they introduced fundamental concepts in quantitative genomics and presented the current state of knowledge in the field. The hands-on exercises relied on rTASSEL, a TASSEL interface recently developed in R by co-collaborators Brandon Monier, Terry Casstevens, and Ed Buckler.
By using rTASSEL, the students learned how to (1) deploy and work with TASSEL data types in R, (2) analyze the large nested association mapping (NAM) population in an efficient manner to conduct genome-wide association studies, and (3) develop genomic prediction models. They also acquired fundamental skills to identify major causal genes and validate models for genomic selection on agronomic traits.
