Key message Genetic gain in Nordic spring barley varieties was estimated to 1.07% per year. Additionally, genomic predictive ability for yield was 0.61 in a population of breeding lines. Abstract Barley is one of the most important crops in Europe and meeting the growing demand for food and feed requires continuous increase in yield. Genomic prediction (GP) has the potential to be a cost-efficient tool in breeding for complex...

Key message Linkage disequilibrium (LD)-based haplotyping with subsequent SNP tagging improved the genomic prediction accuracy up to 0.07 and 0.092 for Fusarium head blight resistance and spike width, respectively, across six different models. Abstract Genomic prediction is a powerful tool to enhance genetic gain in plant breeding. However, the method is accompanied by various complications leading to low prediction accuracy....

Nuclear and chloroplast microsatellite markers were used to study population structure and gene flow among seven Cretan populations of the Aegean endemic plant species Brassica cretica (Brassicaceae). Both nuclear and chloroplast markers revealed exceptionally high levels of population differentiation (overall F ST = 0.628 and 1.000, respectively) and relatively little within‐population diversity (overall H S = 0.211 and 0.000...

Besides showing an extraordinary degree of phenotypic variability, Capsella bursa‐pastoris (Brassicaceae) is also one of the world's most common plant species and a serious weed in many countries. We have employed a coalescent‐based Bayesian analysis of chloroplast microsatellite data to infer demographic and evolutionary parameters of this species. Two different demographic models applied to data from seven chloroplast micros...