Managing crop breeding data

“It is truly a ‘one-stop-shop’ for the global yam breeding community,” said Ismail Rabbi, a geneticist at IITA and member of the new yam project. “We adopted an ‘open data’ policy and therefore people can access the data from anywhere and help in the improvement of the crop.”

And there are similar resources for cassava, sweet potato and bananas, the common denominator being Lukas Muller at BTI. All these resources are focused very much on the management of material and data within breeding programmes. They have very different, but fairly limited, approaches to the question of linking back whatever the breeder does to accessions in genebanks. For example, it would be good to see DOIs catered for. Open data is all well and good, but open silos are still silos.

Diverse takes on diversification

The time is right to make the transition from a staple grain processed agricultural system to an agricultural system that promotes diversity, nutrition, increased wealth, growth in incomes, through diversity and increase in high-value crops.

Nice to hear that, from Prabhu Pingali no less, director of the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition at Cornell University, as part of an IFPRI special policy seminar: Tales of yield improvement and farewell to Mark Rosegrant.

Especially as a recent meta-analysis of the association between production diversity, dietary diversity and nutritional outcomes found an inconsistent picture:

An example is the CCAFS study in Africa, which found that more diverse households and farming systems are more food secure, but only up to a point, and the association depends on a number of other, interacting factors.

As Lawrence Haddad so wisely says in his tweet above, you have to find the right situation. That may be complicated, but still worth doing.

More on cassava germplasm from Brazil

You might remember a post from a couple of weeks back comparing the localities of cassava accessions in Genesys (mostly conserved at CIAT) with cultivation of the crop in Brazil. I ended that little piece with the observation that when data from the national genebank system of that country finally makes its way into Genesys, which should not be long now, it will be possible to really figure out where the gaps are in the “global” collection of the crop. Well, as it happens, there was a Tweet just recently which included a photo of a map of where Embrapa’s cassava accessions come from:

So, quick as a flash, I imported it into Google Earth as an image overlay, and after much fiddling to make it fit on top of the background provided by GE (only partially successfully), was able to compare it with the accessions in Genesys:

The two sets of accessions (red for Embrapa, yellow for CIAT) look nicely complementary at a glance. Maybe the gaps in one collection are adequately covered by the other, and vice versa (which of course then brings up the issue of safety duplication, but that’s another post). Or maybe not: this is a really crude way of looking at the data. But it does point to the importance of data sharing and the need for collaboration among genebanks, national and international.

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