Vitamin A deficiency continues to cause challenges around the world including in areas where maize is an important component of human diets. Biofortification offers one solution for alleviating this deficiency. A Carotenoid Association Mapping panel, developed by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) contains 380 inbred lines adapted to tropical and subtropical environments that have varying grain concentrations of provitamin A and other health-beneficial carotenoids. The data in this study were used to assess the accuracy of several genomic prediction (GP) strategies for maize grain carotenoid traits within and between four environments in Mexico. Results are provided for these strategies including Ridge Regression-Best Linear Unbiased Prediction (including all markers versus subsets of markers), Elastic Net, Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces, and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator. The findings described in the accompanying journal article indicate the utility of genomic prediction methods for grain carotenoid traits and could inform their resource-efficient implementation in biofortification breeding programs.
