AGRINOME™ for Breeding
The oil palm is a relatively new crop with about a hundred years of history and about 10 cycles of plant breeding being conducted. It is originally aimed to improve the palm’s yield potential, oil quality and stress tolerance, is nowadays expanded to sustainability and climate change, as the world is facing challenges such as depleting arable land, food security, environment degradation, reduced farm labor and changing climate pattern. The core of the breeding program involves a series of activities in creating genetic variability, selecting the best among the variants and multiplying the selected genotype, which generates massive data progressively throughout a decade of breeding efforts.
AGRINOME™ for Breeding centralizes the big data in oil palm breeding collected from different research stations over the years, which includes germplasm information, breeding/crossing program, trial records, field performance data and seed inventory, and then provides smart analytics engines to continuously crunch these massive data into useful insights. The resulting information is essential to drive smarter and faster selection of elite materials that are previously unexplored but have economically important traits, such as disease-resistance, high-yielding, and shorter palm height. Also, better data collection and management technology would automate some of the tedious and manual works required in breeders’ daily job, thus enables them to focus more attention on harnessing the actual data for better crop improvement.
Finding the best materials
for your breeding trial.
Select the right germplasm materials for breeding/crossing program and trial is the key to successful breeding. Our Trial Designer and Manager solutions allow flexible selection of paternal and maternal materials based on their past field performances, evaluation of their potential outcomes based on historical data, management of the breeding inventory, trial implementation and data collection.
Documentation on the oil palm lineage is important to ensure end-to-end traceability of advanced planting materials production with the correct crosses and proven pedigree or parental lines. AGRINOME™ visualizes the known pedigree of breeding materials in an interactive graphical form, overcoming shortcomings that are time-consuming to manually check, track, verify and retrieve the parental information from the large collection of germplasm dataset collection.
The selection of best-performing materials for oil palm breeding is one of the key decisions to be made by plant breeders to produce palms with superior traits. This would require access to the large dataset that has been generating over decades of breeding efforts. The analytics module in AGRINOME™ enables breeders to screen for suitable breeding materials based on specific parameter inputs such as bunch component characteristics, and then benchmark the potential candidates against in-house or publicly-known standards in just a few clicks.
Multi-dimensional access
to your data.
Breeding research for oil palm involves more than 10-20 years of effort with a high variety of data being collected from different research stations, namely but not limited to germplasm data, crossing data, trial data, environment factors and field performance data such as bunch components, vegetative, yield and fatty acid composition. Our Breeding Explorer organizes, converges and visualizes all data into a single visualisation browser to facilitates the seamless and real-time retrieval of useful information by the breeders. All data at your fingertips!
Accurate data is fundamental for successful oil palm breeding. The phenotypic traits such as height increment, fresh fruit bunch and bunch weight require intensive labor and multiple rounds of data collection, whereby data collection workflow and standardization of resulting dataset are predominantly important to ensure high veracity of collected data. AGRINOME™ improves the data collection method by having digital tagging of palm coupled with mobile application that digitise and facilitate the entire data collection workflow, ensuring clean data with correct format and structure while eliminating human errors or inconsistency during field observation throughout the productive years of oil palm.
The collected field performance data in oil palm breeding can be aligned and converged with different layers of data, such as Geographic Information System (GIS) data, genomics data, aerial surveillance data, weather data, terrain information, disease incidences and soil information, to gain insights into how the genetic and environment factors, and their interactions affected the outcomes of the breeding products.
Conventional way of data management usually involves manual data keeping in printed reports (hardcopy) or Excel sheets (softcopy) and handled by respective person-in-charge from respective stations or a centralized office. The access to the data could be difficult and time-consuming. With a centralized cloud database accessible elsewhere with internet accessibility, the AGRINOME™ users can reach their data via an interactive graphical user interface and a few buttons away from downloading the desired dataset from the database.