Plant breeding is a numbers game – to quickly develop needed crop varieties in the face of rapidly changing climatic conditions, plant breeders need to screen thousands of plants each year. Now, a new, free program that creates QR labels for field plots will help plant breeders in lower-income countries develop crop varieties more quickly and efficiently, while removing access barriers between higher- and lower-resourced scientists. The effort is aimed at strengthening agricultural capacity and food security worldwide, and is supported by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Crop Improvement (ILCI).
The program, qrlabelr, is an open-source, user-friendly application that easily designs plot labels that can be read by both humans and computers. It was released Oct. 13 on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), a central, global repository for software created in the R programming language. It will aid plant breeders in tracking each planting in an experiment – which can run between hundreds and thousands of individual plants. Its development was led by Alex Kena, a senior lecturer in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. Kena is also a research scientist for the Trait Discovery group within ILCI, and he’s spent the past year and a half working at Colorado State University (CSU) to develop solutions for plant breeders in the Global South.
To discover new plant traits, such as drought-tolerance or disease-resistance, scientists study both the genetics of plants, and their phenomics – the way genes are actually expressed in growing plants. Modern phenomics requires collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data, which in turn requires effective communication and recordkeeping.
“When I joined ILCI, I saw my colleagues in the U.S. had a lab computer with a program everyone could use to label their field trials,” Kena said. “I came from an under-resourced program in Ghana, so I immediately recognized that I didn’t have access to that kind of technology, because of the cost.”
Source: cornell.edu
Photo Credit: istockgetty-images-plus-claraveritas
Categories: New York, Crops