Fig. 8. The relative performance of five breeding strategies for six general classes of genetic model. In all cases, performance is represented as the difference in response between a given breeding strategy and the Mapping Start Only (MSO) method. Positive values indicate the breeding strategy had a higher response than the MSO method, and negative values indicate the breeding strategy had a lower response than the MSO method. The performance differences are expressed in terms of normalized trait value. Each line represents average performance across 20000 runs of the breeding program (600000 runs in total). A categorization of the E(NK) models considered is given in Table 1; E = the number of different environment types conditioning gene-by-environment interactions in the target population of environments, and K = level of epistasis.