Genomics for germplasm improvement and adaptation

The majority of genebank curators act as service providers, making accession diversity (physical specimens) available to the research and breeding communities for evaluation and applied plant improvement among other research and development activities. Successfully applying functional genomics in trait or gene discovery requires diverse genetic resources and crop phenotyping resources and genomics tools integrated with bioinfor-matics. The first challenge in this regard concerns mechanisms for combining genomics technologies with accurate phenotyping to provide powerful tools of trait identification based on genetics of crops and the value proposition of further investigating individual accessions in any population.