Participatory varietal selection of potato using the mother & baby trial design: A gender-responsive trainer’s guide.

This guide aims to provide step-by-step guidance on facilitating and documenting the PVS dynamics using the MBT design to select, and eventually release, potato varieties preferred by end-users that suit male and female farmers ’different needs, diverse agro-systems, and management practices, as well as traders ’and consumers’ preferences

Progress in developing a sweetpotato ontology for breeders

Crop ontologies have been identified under the Generation Challenge Program and at the International Potato Center (CIP) as a crucial tool for managing and analyzing crop related information. Here we report progress on applying ontological concepts on sweetpotato traits important for breeders and varietal development. We defined a general strategy of identifying important traits based on their re-use in catalogs and experience in usage. A list of about 40 descriptors was identified, including 17 morphological and 22 evaluation traits. Those traits were crosschecked against other crop-ontologies (cassava, barley, maize, solanaceae) on the community site ‘crop ontology’ for consistency. Where appropriate, we annotated linkages. The current draft list of traits is still work-in-progress and subject to further review and refinement. This will include completion of traits, further consistency checks and translation before depositing on the crop-ontology site. The 39 descriptors include morphological (17), agronomical (3), resistance (4), biochemical (11) and post-harvest (4) traits

Progress in developing a potato ontology for breeders.

The potato ontology is part of a community effort to establish a set of related crop ontologies. The advantage of an ontology is that both humans and software applications can understand a data domain. This will allow the application of numerical or data mining techniques that may help to uncover previously unknown correlations. Building on previous draft versions, here we focus on traits important to breeding: we identified so far 70 descriptors. These include: morphological (36), agronomical performance (7), resistance traits (7), biochemical (6), reaction to abiotic stresses (2), molecular (1 ) and post-harvest (9). We anticipate further refinements and cross-checks

Integrating and sharing accession-level and omics-size genotype, phenotype and environmental data: Experiences at the International Potato Center (CIP).

Plant breeding consists in the creation and selection of new genotypes. This involves not only keeping records across generations and environments but also accommodating data of increasing resolution on genotypes, phenotypes, and growth environments. Some such high-resolution characterization methods are Near-Infrared spectroscopy, metabolomics, next-generation sequencing and high resolution spatial-temporal-spectral photos. A first need is the integration and retrieval of this information. Such an integrated and complete set can be described in breeder’s terms in six dimensions: a plant phenotype (P) is the result of a genotypes (G) interaction with its environment (E) given certain field management (M) practices. In addition, data on the administrative (A) context should be kept including staff involved, objectives and, if applicable, projects and donors; as well as on data documentation standards (S) like ontologies. The latter play an important part in exchanging and aggregating information. Here we describe the adoption of the ‘Biomart’ database for this purpose. While Biomart was developed originally to accommodate gene and sequencing data at a genomic scale we describe here how it can be used for breeding program data. This is being illustrated by current data warehousing in the potato breeding program at the International Potato Center (CIP). Particularly, genotype and phenotype can be transparently combined for further analysis in the decision process for the selection of new genotypes

Selección participativa de variedades de papa (SPV) usando el diseño mamá y bebé: una guía para capacitadores con perspectiva de género.

El objetivo de esta guía es orientar paso a paso la facilitación y documentación de la dinámica SPV (Seleccion participativa de variedades) usando el diseño M&B para seleccionar, y eventualmente liberar, variedades de papa preferidas por los usuarios finales, que se adapten a las diferentes necesidades de los agricultores, a los diversos agro-ecosistemas y prácticas de manejo como también a las preferencias de comerciantes y consumidores