Tainan, Taiwan
April 15, 2011

Source: AVRDC-The World Vegetable Center Newsletter

International collaborative plant breeding efforts got a boost during a recent five-day workshop organized by AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center, the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the Generation Challenge program.

Held at the ICRISAT campus in Hyderabad, India in the first week of April, the workshop brought together more than 60 plant breeders, researchers, and programmers from around the world who are working on the International Crop Information System (ICIS). This open source suite of software tools can manage data on genetic resources and breeding for any crop.

Warwick Easdown and Ramakrishnan Nair from AVRDC’s Regional Center for South Asia and Roland Schlafleitner from AVRDC headquarters attended.

During the opening address, Warwick Easdown emphasized the value of software tools for enhancing plant breeding and the need to work more collaboratively across institutions. The ICIS
development team has been building breeding tools for 15 years in a spirit of open sharing. It meets periodically to review progress and priorities as user needs and technologies change in the rapidly developing fields of molecular biology and informatics.

The ICIS suite of programs is particularly suited to building collaborative breeding projects over the web. It can complement commercial breeding programs and its community of practice helps all participating institutions improve their management of breeding data to produce better varieties more quickly.

“I learned a lot from the informatics people at the workshop,” said Ram Nair. “ICIS is one of the ways for us to achieve better networking between breeding programs.” ICIS tools are compatible with the current internal management of AVRDC breeding data, and Roland Schlafleitner observed that ICIS is used by the larger CGIAR centers and it is suited to international data sharing.

The workshop, hosted with support from the Australian Center for International Agricultural, included detailed discussions on software development, the management of molecular and pedigree data for breeding decisions, and the use of controlled vocabularies for consistent naming of data between institutions. The activity is the first in a project between AVRDC and ICRISAT to improve the management of breeding data for selected crops. AVRDC will focus on legume data this year, with the aim of developing a broader project with ICRISAT.

Website: http://www.icrisat.org

Published: April 15, 2011