CIMMYT staff got a sneak peak at the new crop resource portal GENESYS on Tuesday 13 April 2010. Mohamed Fawzy Farag Nawar from Bioversity International demonstrated how easy it is to use the new portal and explained why Bioversity, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and the Secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture have teamed up for this project.
“The number one reason we created this system is because, until now, other systems didn’t have complete characterization and trait data,” Nawar said. “GENESYS will make the huge amount of currently existing work and date available to the public.”
GENESYS is built upon previous crop data systems, such as the CGIAR’s SINGER. The idea is to create a comprehensive portal where users can easily find accessions using improved search tools that incorporate characterization and evaluation data along with environmental data from the accession’s collection point. The portal contains 22 crops and 2 million accessions. For more information visit: http://www.genesys-pgr.org/.
