Modern animal breeding programmes are constantly evolving with advances in breeding theory, biotechnology and genetics. Surprisingly, there seems to be no generally accepted succinct definition of what exactly a breeding programme is, neither is there a unified language to describe breeding programmes in a comprehensive, unambiguous and reproducible way. In this work, we try to fill this gap by suggesting a general definition of breeding programmes that also pertains to cases where genetic progress is not achieved through selection, but, for example, through transgenic technologies, or the aim is not to generate genetic progress, but, for example, to maintain genetic diversity. The key idea of the underlying concept is to represent a breeding programme in modular form as a directed graph that is composed of nodes and edges, where nodes represent cohorts of breeding units, usually individuals, and edges represent breeding activities, like "selection" or "reproduction." We claim, that by defining a comprehensive set of nodes and edges, it is possible to represent any breeding programme of arbitrary complexity by such a graph, which thus comprises a full description of the breeding programme. This concept is implemented in a web-based tool (MoBPSweb, available at www.mobps.de) and has a link to the R-package MoBPS (Modular Breeding Program Simulator) to simulate the described breeding programmes. The approach is illustrated by showcasing three different breeding programmes of increasing complexity. The concept allows a formal description of breeding programmes, which is requested, for example, in legal regulations of the European Union, but so far cannot be provided in a standardized format. In the discussion, we point out potential limitations of the concept and argue that the general approach can be easily extended to account for novel breeding technologies, to breeding of crops or experimental species, but also to modelling diversity dynamics in natural populations.

中文翻译：

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动物育种计划的统一概念

现代动物育种计划随着育种理论、生物技术和遗传学的进步而不断发展。令人惊讶的是，对于育种计划究竟是什么，似乎没有普遍接受的简洁定义，也没有统一的语言以全面、明确和可重复的方式描述育种计划。在这项工作中，我们试图通过提出育种计划的一般定义来填补这一空白，该定义也适用于遗传进步不是通过选择实现的情况，但例如通过转基因技术，或者目标不是产生遗传进步，但是，例如，为了保持遗传多样性。底层概念的关键思想是以模块化形式将育种程序表示为由节点和边组成的有向图，其中节点代表育种单位的队列，通常是个体，边代表育种活动，如“选择”或“繁殖”。我们声称，通过定义一组全面的节点和边，可以用这样的图来表示任意复杂性的任何育种计划，从而包括对育种计划的完整描述。这个概念是在一个基于网络的工具（MoBPSweb，可在 www.mobps.de 上获得）中实现的，并且有一个链接到 R-package MoBPS（模块化育种程序模拟器）来模拟所描述的育种程序。通过展示三个日益复杂的不同育种计划来说明该方法。该概念允许对育种计划进行正式描述，例如在欧盟法律法规中要求的，但到目前为止还不能以标准化格式提供。在讨论中，我们指出了该概念的潜在局限性，并认为一般方法可以很容易地扩展到解释新的育种技术、作物或实验物种的育种，以及模拟自然种群的多样性动态。