I have been thinking of a few ideas that could be interesting enough to spend time on them. Some of them could even get funded:
- What if? A lot of the time we stop thinking about problems becasue there are specific barriers or limitations to put the results into practice. What happens if we ignore those barries (that is, we assume that are solvable) and keep going?
- How would breeding and deployment strategies change if there were molecular markers (that work) readily avaiable.
- How would breeding strategies change if we had very early testing for wood properties?
- Development of tools that make breeder’s lives easier:
- A flexible breeding strategies simulator for more flexible strategies (not only discrete generations truncation selection). May be written in R+ASReml.
- Mate selection algorithms: alternatives to current computer-intensive work. Would using the dual solution help? Tailor this tool to the management of small populations for conservation purposes and breeding programmes.
- Simple tools for breeding objectives work (for industry, sort of excel add-ons or applets).
- Breeding for specific purposes:
- Breeding and bioenergy production.
- Breeding and land recovery (tolerance to and extraction of heavy metals, for example).
- Genetics of pests and diseases. Any approaches that may differ from the conventional approaches?
- Iron out issues with rolling front strategies (this links to the simulator above). Can we make implementation easy and ‘for dummies’?
- Genetics of small populations: strategies for long-term management. Could this work with restoration research? This also relates to the mate selection algorithms work.