24 / SEEDWORLD.COM FEBRUARY 2019 ADVANCING BREEDING PRO- GRAMS for sunflowers has been chal- lenging because the genome is very large (slightly larger than the human genome) with little historical genotyping infor- mation available. Since 2010, Eurofins BioDiagnostics has worked together with the National Sunflower Association (NSA) and the USDA to create a high- density marker panel applicable for modern breeding programs. To this end, the vast majority of USDA sunflower lines were genotyped and an Illumina 10K sun- flower bead array was developed. Based on this genotyping platform sunflower breeders were able to advance their breeding programs using marker assisted selection, QTL mapping and association mapping projects. Unfortunately, the number of markers and the cost of the genotyping using the arrays were prohibitive and many breed- ers were unable to use the technology in their day to day breeding selections. More recently, the power of sequencing has made genotyping much more affordable. Now genotyping by sequencing with medium size panels of 500 to 1000 SNPs has been used extensively by breeders in other crops like corn and soybean for genomic selection and acceleration of breeding programs. To fill this gap in sunflower, Eurofins BioDiagnostics partnered with Applied Biosciences (Thermo Fisher) to develop AgriSeqTM, a genotyping by sequencing (GBS) panel for sunflower which can help sunflower breeders with their QTL map- ping, marker assisted backcrossing and genomic selection projects. With access to a large database with genotypes of public materials, we were able to select Accelerating Sunflower Breeding with Genotyping by Sequencing FARHAD GHAVAMI, EUROFINS BIODIAGNOSTICS CHIEF SCIENCE OFFICER FarhadGhavami@eurofinsUS.com • eurofinsus.com/biodiagnostics the most informative markers that cover the whole sunflower genome to provide breeders with the advanced technology and the most informative SNP panels. Hopefully, this will help accelerate sun- flower breeding programs and reverse the decline of sunflower production acre- age in the United States. This panel is available to any public or private breeder in any size program anywhere in the world. This SNP panel is a diverse panel which means the informa- tion will work on most sunflower varieties. MY WIFE, JEN, and I love to play Scrabble. We played quite a bit before we were married and I was sure that I was the superior player. She thought she was, so I started keeping track of our game results. More than 15 years later, we’ve logged 1,798 game scores! I’ve learned two things by tracking our individual game results. 1) Jen is better than me at Scrabble by five percent and 2) being five percent worse over 1,798 games means I am way behind! Here are a couple stats. Over 1,798 games, Jen has a running average of 323.3 points per game and mine is 306.7. Being behind by 5.4 percent doesn’t sound like much, but in context of total points behind, however, it’s huge. I trail by 16.6 points per game over 1,798 games, which puts me 29,846.8 points in the hole. At my current average of 306.7 points per game, I’d have to shut Jen out in 98 consecutive games just to get back to even. I’m going to have to get a lot better and live a long time to catch her! Think about this in business terms. What business processes does your company repeat hundreds or thousands of times each year? What if you could improve them by just five percent? How much could that help your business over in the long-term? Let’s look at the reduction of overtime for one hourly employee with a wage of $15 per hour and 500 hours of overtime per year. Those 500 overtime hours have an annual of $11,250. If you eliminate just five percent of those hours, the annual savings is $562.50. That might not sound like much, but take that over 15 years (like our Scrabble game log) and that total savings are $8,437.50. Make the five per- 5% Makes all the Difference JIM SCHWEIGERT GRO ALLIANCE PRESIDENT @jim_schweigert • jim.schweigert@groalliance.com • GroAlliance.com cent improvement to more than just one employee’s time and the benefit really starts to add up. It’s common to think about big ways to transform a company activity or process, but major strides can be made just by improving your most frequent activities by small amounts. I encour- age you to look at your company’s most common activities and brainstorm ways to improve them by just five percent. Track the improvement as frequently as possible and report the improvements to the team. Making small improvements to your most common activities can be the long-term “game changer” your company is missing!