A blog post from CIMMYT presented a welcome opportunity to play around with a range of online information resources on wheat varieties, despite the fact that some of the links are broken.
So let’s say I want to find out about a particular variety. Sonalika, for example. I heard about it as being an important older Indian variety, and want to find out more: a pedigree, maybe some performance data, maybe even get some seed. First, I headed on over to the IWIS-Bib database, which “is a supplement to the International Wheat Information System. Each record in IWIS-Bib identifies a publication, and each publication describes a cultivar.” For Sonalika, that returns the citations of 11 references. Good start, though I do now have to get hold of the publications themselves. Maybe in the future I’ll be able to download a PDF, or there will be a link to Google Scholar, or whatever.
Let’s move on. I was not able to find a way of getting performance data for Sonalika from IWIS proper, though I was at the time pretty sure I’d be able to order seed of it from CIMMYT. But, having thought that, I then checked, and Sonalika does not feature in a Genesys search as being conserved at CIMMYT, although you get hits from various other genebanks, including USDA. And there’s plenty of characterization and evaluation data there. I may be doing CIMMYT a disservice here, though. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, but certainly there was no way of getting easily from a bibliographic hit on a particular variety to evaluation data on it. Which it would be nice to be able to do.
Moving on again, I then headed over to the Genetic Resources Information and Analytical System for Wheat and Triticale (GRIS), the main subject of the blog post I mentioned at the beginning. Entering Sonalika in the little search box gave me a whole lot of very cool stuff. Like a pedigree: II-53-388/ANDES//(SIB)PITIC-62/3/LERMA-ROJO-64. Which you might like to compare with the one on GRIN: II53-388/Andes//Pitic 62 sib/3/Lerma Rojo 64. Reassuringly similar. And accession numbers; which interestingly do not include CIMMYT. So it does look like I wouldn’t be able to get Sonalika from them after all. You also get summary evaluation data and even recommendations for use, which is very handy. And a pedigree diagram, which is, however, frustratingly impossible to export.
So, overall, a not uninteresting though ultimately somewhat disappointing experience, mainly because of the necessity of hopping between websites. But maybe those linkages will come now that a bunch of the people concerned have had a meeting, as described in the post that started all this. Fingers crossed.