现代作物育种技术的进步充分体现了从经验科学走向精确科学的过程。在过去的几十年里，世界范围内玉米新品种选育技术取得了长足发展，特别是随着分子生物学的兴起，育种家能够精确地了解育种群体的遗传组成，为精确地进行后代选择创造了一个必要条件。随着现代精确育种技术的发展，育种家需要用性状表现型数据和基因型数据在基因型和表现型之间建立因果联系。基因型数据的获取已经实现了标准化和工业化，费用相对低廉，性状表现型数据的获取日益变成了精确育种技术的瓶颈，亟待创新突破。近年来，通过育种家、工程师、数据科学家之间的通力合作，可以应用于作物育种过程的高通量数据采集技术逐步发展完善，使实时动态采集植物生长发育动态和环境反馈的非破坏性数据成为可能，为今后精确育种技术的发展提供了另一个必要条件。

Modern crop breeding technology vividly demonstrates its growing path from the empirical to the precision. In the last few decades, worldwide maize breeding technologies had been experienced significant advancement, especially after application of molecular biology in the breeding process. As the advances in precision breeding technology, breeders are required to establish robust relationships between genotypes and phenotypes. Nowadays, genotyping technology has advanced dramatically, the cost and throughput allow that breeders to genotype their entire breeding population with no many burdens. Precision phenotyping is becoming the bottleneck in the precision breeding technology and innovative breakthroughs are urgent needs. Recent years breeders, engineers, and data scientists collaborate together to develop high throughput data acquisition methods that enable to monitor growth dynamics of plants non-destructively and environmental responses in real time. This provides another underlying pillars to support precision progeny selections.

国家“863”计划“强优势玉米杂交种的创制与应用”（2011AA10A103）；国家“863”计划“玉米DH工程化育种技术与新品种选育研究”（2012AA101203）；吉林省“双十”攻关“玉米单倍体规模化育种技术研究与新品种选育”（11ZDGG002）