Optimizing Resource Allocation for Multistage Selection in Plant Breeding with R Package Selectiongain

Most plant‐breeding programs involve multistage selection, but hitherto no flexible and computationally efficient software has been freely available for calculating the selection gain and optimizing the allocation of resources under these conditions. Here we describe the use of the newly‐developed R package selectiongain that enables (i) calculation of the selection gain for up to 20 selection stages and (ii) a grid search of the optimum allocation of resources (number of candidates, locations, and testers) for given costs and correlations among the selection criteria in each stage. The capabilities of our software are demonstrated with an example taken from the literature on selecting doubled haploid lines in maize across three stages.