A transformational breeding data management system goes online at CGIAR centers

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This story was initially published at EBS.excellenceinbreeding.org

In the race to develop more nutritious and climate-resilient varieties, crop breeders have access to enormous amounts of data: managing the operation of trials in different locations around the world, understanding soil and climate in multiple environments, measuring the field performance of hundreds of thousands of plants, and peeking inside the genome to predict which crosses to make.

To unleash the potential of accelerated breeding, software developers and breeders have been working together to design and create the Enterprise Breeding System (EBS), a single cloud-based software platform for all aspects of breeding data collection, management and analysis. This development team works closely with early adopters at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).

In a major Program milestone, the EBS has now been adopted by IRRI, and a launch event took place at IITA on 22 April 2022. The EBS has also gone live at CIMMYT, and is being adopted in a phased approach by the maize and wheat breeding programs. To reach this stage EBS needed enough functionality to manage the basics of a breeding process and replace the existing data management systems in use at IRRI and other centers, although development continues.

“There is now a centralized data source for breeding management,” said Marko Karkkainen, EBS Product Lead. “We have core functionalities such as experiment creation and management, data collection and a harvest manager. But it is just the beginning, over time we are adding more capabilities.”

EBS Milestone 4.0 Tools and functionalities

  • Create new experiments with designs used by breeders.
  • Quickly create experiment layouts.
  • View, sort and edit data on all experiments from a simple dashboard.
  • Manage the seeds, packages and germplasm harvested from experiments, with support for up to 10,000 entries in each list.
  • Powerful search function for germplasm, seeds and traits.
  • Collect trait data that can be viewed and exported for each occurrence.

 

Read more here.

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