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bioRxiv2026

INCREASING PHENOMIC PREDICTION EFFICIENCY USING A PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS BASED PRE-PROCESSING OF NEAR INFRARED SPECTRA

Phenomic prediction (PP) is a genetic value prediction method based on near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Spectra pre-processing is a key step in the analysis pipeline of PP and generally involves chemometrics methods. However, the choice of pre-processing is usually done either arbitrarily or through a search of the optimal set of methods and associated parameters. In this study, we propose to implement a singular value decomposition (SVD) step in the pre-processing pipeline where genetic values of spectra are estimated on a set of principal components instead of individual wavelengths. This way, estimations are based on a few informative, orthogonal and interpretable features of spectra instead of many correlated, uninformative wavelengths. We tested this pre-processing method on five datasets representing four plant species (maize, rice, sorghum and grapevine). Results show that estimating genetic values on components of raw spectra, that are not weighted by their eigenvalues, performs as well as doing it on spectra pre-processed with the best classical chemometrics methods in most cases, while requiring less parameter optimization. Moreover, this SVD step opens up possibilities for better understanding and selecting parts of the spectral information that are relevant for PP.

genetics↗

bioRxiv2025

Factors Influencing Phenomic Prediction: A Case Study on a Large Sorghum BCNAM Population

Plant breeding efficiency is crucial to develop varieties able to cope with climate change and support food and feed value chains. Genomic prediction (GP) has been a major step in increasing this efficiency and is now routinely used in breeding programs. Recently, phenomic prediction (PP) has gained attention as a promising complementary approach to GP, further increasing the breeding programs efficiency. Factors impacting the predictive ability (PA) of PP have been studied on many species but are not fully clarified. In this context, we studied the impacts of spectra pre-processing, prediction methods, population structure, training set size, NIRS acquisition environment and wavelength selection on a large multi-parental sorghum population including 2498 genotypes. Our results show that PP can compete with GP, that it is less affected by population structure, and can reach its maximal PA with smaller training sets than GP, but its performances are trait dependant. We also show that NIRS can be acquired in a reference environment to perform prediction in other environments and that it is possible to randomly select as little as 10 wavelengths to perform predictions. Finally, we show that spectra pre-processing, and statistical methods have a limited and unclear impact on PA. Our study confirms that PP is a relevant trait prediction method that deserves attention to optimize breeding schemes. The main challenges for the future will be to better understand the information contained in the spectra and disentangle their genetic and proxy components to optimize the use of PP in breeding programs. Key messagePhenomic prediction is promising for sorghum breeding. Geneticists methods may not be suited to optimally extract spectral information.

genomics↗