Journal Article

rYWAASB: An R package designed for the concurrent selection of stable and high-performing p lant genotypes

Ali Arminian, Solmaz Amiri, Hamid Hassaneian Khoshro

2026

Overview

Various techniques have been employed to assess the stability and adaptability of crops, where mixed models or BLUP-based indexes like WAASB proving particularly more benefit. We introduce rYWAASB, an open-source R package designed to offer a novel index for quantifying both stability and performance of a biological trait. It quantifies the stability and performance of individuals/genotypes e.g. in plant breeding programs. It simultaneously considers the trait of interest, along with the WAASB index in a new perspective. The package then provides bar plots, PCA diagrams, and optimum cluster number estimate and cluster categorization by MCMC algorithms. For executing the package, a field experiment was conducted on chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) from 2018 to 2020, evaluating the grain yield and days to maturity in rainfed conditions. The genotypes have put in 7 clusters for grain yield while genotypes 18, 69, and 5 were the most stable, exhibiting the highest grain yields, but genotypes 2, 103, 27, and 88 are identified as the earliest ripening varieties, exhibiting a higher degree of stability. The findings highlighted the effectiveness of the novel rYWAASB index in distinguishing observations in the experiment, suggesting its potential application in agronomic and plant breeding stability and adaptability programs.

• Publisher: Universidade Estadual de Maringá
• Subject: Average Silhouette Method, cluster, PCA, ranking, stability analysis