Bioversity International (Bioversity), in partnership with the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) and the Secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), is currently leading the development of a global portal to provide more comprehensive information on germplasm accessions by utilizing innovative functionality to facilitate the efficient and effective use of biodiversity for plant improvement.

The overall goal of the joint project is to provide users with improved access to the millions of accessions held in genebanks worldwide. To achieve this, it is important that additional information, beyond the identifying passport data traditionally available in online genebank systems, be accessible to plant breeders, scientists and other users.

To facilitate increased and improved use of germplasm, additional accession data, such as plant height, growing periods at given locations, seed color, response to specific pests or diseases, response to various climatic conditions and possible end uses needs to be readily available. This type of information, often called characterization and evaluation data, along with environmental data based on the longitude and latitude at collection sites, will be included in the global portal, complementing passport data currently available and rendering these genebank accessions more useful to plant breeders and scientists.

To facilitate its utilization and ensure users are provided with the requested data, the global portal has been designed in a user-friendly format, allowing individuals to query accession(s) of interest according to simple criteria and key words rather than complex codes often decipherable only by the originator. The portal’s user-friendly search system will allow those wishing to obtain and use germplasm information to make specific and independent queries. This is the key to promoting the use of accession data for plant improvement, as every researcher will have individual and unique research needs.

Further, the global portal will provide users with the ability to query any accession attributes for which information is available. For example, one might use the portal to find information regarding the following specific request: ‘Show me the chickpea accessions with taxonomy of Cicer arietinum collected in Central Asia which are geo-referenced and grow where the annual precipitation is between 50 and 200mm’.

Try the demonstration website using this query to see how many chickpea accessions meet these criteria.

The global portal prototype currently contains information on 1.2 million accessions of 22 crops and includes more than three million additional observation/phenotypic records on a variety of traits (available only from the Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN) at this stage). Eventually, the portal will be global in its genebank coverage; however, at present, in addition to the 22 crops, the portal only draws data from the SGRP/SINGER global network of the CGIAR, the ECGPR/EURISCO catalogue from Europe and the USDA collections of the GRIN system.