Divseek Canada Initiative

The challenges to global food security are well documented. Canada must dramatically expand agricultural production to meet the challenges by developing high yielding, climate-adapted and “planet friendly” varieties. Canada is also a signatory of the Convention for Biological Diversity and the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources in Food and Agriculture. To become fully compliant with the Treaty and other international agreements, we must develop effective mechanisms for sharing plant germplasm, as well as genotypic, phenotypic, and genomic information.
DivSeek (http://www.divseek.org) offers a potential pathway forward on both fronts by accelerating plant breeding though development of “a unified, coordinated and cohesive information management platform to provide easy access to genotypic and phenotypic data associated with genebank germplasm.”

In the spirit of DivSeek, the goal of our pilot DivSeek Canada initiative is to develop an online crop informatics resource, hosted on ComputeCanada high performance infrastructure, to integrate plant genetic resource germplasm and genotypic and phenotypic metadata for three Canadian crop communities (flax, lentils and sunflower) and to deploy mapping, breeding, and visualization tools online to use this data, as a blueprint for the integration of genomics data from other crops in the future. We suspect that the utility of such an informatics resource will be greatest in medium to small crop communities that have not previously had the financial resources or bioinformatics skill set to fully exploit the enormous quantity of genomic information rapidly becoming available for essentially all crops and their wild relatives.