User-friendly SAS macro application to compute and compare stress tolerance index (Fernandez, 1992)
I proposed a new stress tolerance index (STI) (Fernandez, 1992) that favors high yielding under both unstressed and stressed environments. Inter-relationships among all known selection criteria for identifying superior genotypes were also investigated in this paper. According to Google Scholar (2021) more than 1800 research articles cited this STI and favored this measure to identify both high yielding and stress tolerant genotypes. To facilitate easy and efficient computation of STI and its related measures, I have developed a user-friendly SAS macro application called STI macro. SAS software 9.4 was used to develop this macro application. By using this macro approach, agronomists and plant breeders can effectively perform stress tolerance analysis and spend more time in data exploration, interpretation of graphs, and output, rather than debugging their program errors.
STI User-friendly SAS macro application:
First download and unzip the STI.zip file specified in this post. The requirements for using this SAS macro are
(1) a valid license to run the SAS software on your PC, and
(2) SAS modules such as SAS/BASE, SAS/STAT should be installed to get complete results.
The steps for performing the user-friendly SAS macros are:
Step1: Create a SAS data or an excel sheet like the example data file included with the zip file. This data should contain the following variables:
- Variable Genotype (GEN), which is a categorical variable.
- Response means under unstressed (Yp) and stressed environment (Ys) that are continues variables.
- Treatment variable: Categorical variable identifying different level of stress treatments.
Step2: Open the STI macro-call file in your preferred SAS environment. In addition to inputting the dataset name, response variable name under stressed and unstressed environment, genotype variable name, and treatment variable identifying stress level in the MACRO-CALL file, following options are available to specify in the STI macro.:
Options for saving the SAS output and SAS graphics files. Users can select the folders to save the SAS output and the graphics files by inputting the folder names in the MACRO-CALL file. Also, the users can select one of the following ODS output file format when saving the output
produced by the SAS macro TAIGEI:
Display: Files are not saved but displayed in the SAS results Window.
PDF: PDF files suitable for PDF format
WORD: RTF files suitable for including in Microsoft products.
WEB: HTML files suitable for including in HTML-based Web documents.
Step 3. Submit the SAS macro call file.
After inputting all required fields (Figure 2), Run the macro-call file. The MACRO-CALL file automatically accesses the SAS STI macro from the specified location. After a successful run, this macro will generate following output.
Following output tables and graphics are generated when you run the STI macro applications:
References
Fernandez, G.C.J. (1992) Effective Selection Criteria for Assessing Stress Tolerance. In: Kuo, C.G., Ed., Proceedings of the International Symposium on Adaptation of Vegetables and Other Food Crops in Temperature and Water Stress, AVRDC Publication, Tainan, 257-270.
Google scholar (2021) https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YJtknlYAAAAJ&hl=en&scioq=stress+tolerance+index++%27gcj+fe...
