Traits, Trials, and Tribulations in the Triticeae Toolbox

The Triticeae Toolbox (T3) is the repository for phenotype and genotype data on wheat and barley lines produced by the Triticeae CAP, www.triticeaecap.org, a five-year 56-investigator project funded by the US Department of Agriculture.  T3 functions as a "data farm" from which can be harvested the results for any desired subset of the traits, experiments, and germplasm lines, to allow statistical analyses and ultimately increase the efficiency of breeders' selections.  In T3 a phenotype is the value of a specified trait as measured for a particular line in a particular trial.  A trial is performed in a single geographic location in a single year, possibly as part of a larger experiment.  Traits are environmentally influenced characteristics of a line, scored with numeric values.  Traits are organized hierarchically in categories, and may be subcategorized by such factors as measurement date or pathogen race.  Lines are germplasm entities with unique names within T3, synonyms, and several queryable properties including species, breeder, year of creation, and some simple environment-independent attributes.  Currently each phenotype is only the mean trait value for a line and trial over all replicates, but provision is being added for individual plot-level values and field layout descriptions to permit analysis of the raw data.  Currently T3 contains 380,000 phenotypes, from 150 traits and 550 trials.