Oat Global and T3-Oat: Relational Data for Oat Genotypes and Phenotypes

The oat breeding and genetics community has seen a tremendous growth in the quantity of data that it produces in recent years. Data management, analysis and accessibility are increasingly important to ensure that biological knowledge does not lag behind data generation and to realize the potential benefits of 'big data' for the wider oat community.

Oat Global (www.oatglobal.org) is a forum created to develop cohesive strategies for oat research and development through community-wide consultation and by coordinating funding efforts. The aim of the project is to aid the expansion of scientific expertise by facilitating community interaction to increase knowledge, resource and data sharing.

T3/Oat (http://triticeaetoolbox.org/oat/) is the repository of international oat phenotype and genotype data for the Oat Global project. Data stored in T3/Oat is open access and all users are able to submit data, establishing the database as a tool to support coordinated or individual trialing efforts. T3/Oat provides flexible queries for extracting desired datasets for analysis as well as integrated visualization tools for comparing trials, and analytical tools for genomic prediction and association. Applying modern computational techniques to large-scale, shared data in this manner will support scientific publications and variety releases, and will maximize the returns on the increasing volume of data produced by the oat community.