Developing The Triticeae Toolbox (T3)
Database Plant breeding involves analysis of increasing amounts of data. Biotechnologies have enabled high density marker data, and now also sequences, to be obtained from all breeding lines comparatively inexpensively. In addition, the more these data can be effectively shared across breeding programs, the more each program can leverage results at the national scale to improve their own selection decisions. This conjunction calls for the development of a shared database to store phenotype and genotype data from TCAP experiments and from across public-sector breeding programs, to facilitate the joint analysis of those data, and to help disseminate the results of TCAP research. By the end of the TCAP, T3 will house information on tens of thousands of wheat and barley lines, from elite breeding populations and from diverse accessions of the national small grains collection. A flexible web interface will allow users to identify which lines are of interest to them for specific breeding or experimental purposes. Users will either download the data for their own analyses or access visualization, gene identification, or line performance prediction analyses available through T3. We expect T3 to be at the center of modern, data-intensive plant breeding that will accelerate the improvement of barley and wheat. The web interface under construction is http://triticeaetoolbox.org.
