Fig. 5

Selecting individuals with either earlier or later flowering than Zhengdan958. A The distribution of flowering time of the 100 individuals most similar to the target, with the 5% earlier (red) or later (blue) flowering individuals relative to Zhengdan958 (the black vertical line). The proportion of individuals selected with earlier and later flowering compared to Zhengdan958 is indicated by the value before the slash in red and blue, respectively, while the proportion of randomly selected individuals is after the slash in both cases. B The global similarity between selected individuals and Zhengdan958. The global similarity is measured by the mean squared error (MSE) for all traits excluding days to tassel between each selected individual and Zhengdan958; lower MSE values indicate higher global similarity. Three selection scenarios, early-version Zhengdan958 (red), late-version Zhengdan958 (blue), and Zhengdan958 itself (yellow), are presented for comparison with the randomly selected individuals, based on Student’s t test