Accessing genotyping services for crop improvement in developing countries. The Generation Challenge Program (GCP) experience

The Genotyping Support Service (GSS) grants of the Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) were set up to train breeders with little experience of using molecular markers to become more familiar with the analysis of this type of data. The GSS was also seen as a way to provide access to molecular genetic markers to users that hitherto had not the means to routinely use them as part of their breeding program and to demonstrate that the establishment of local large scale genotyping facilities were no longer a requirement to run a modern breeding program. The GCP has collaborated with service providers worldwide to provide genotyping services at preferential rates to GCP users and since 2007, approximately 200 GSS projects have been supported for genotyping with SNPs and SSRs. These include projects evaluating genetic diversity through to MAS for key breeding traits. Projects have covered 14 major field crops from 25 countries. More recently the focus for the GCP has been on providing a SNP genotyping service with LGC Genomics, UK. KASP primers (1000-2000) for 12 crops were generated and 32 million data points produced. Users can now manage and analyze their genotypic data with the Breeding Management System (BMS), a feature rich state of the art breeding software tool developed as part of the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP) of the GCP. With the extension of the IBP project, we plan to continue to offer users a genotyping service for breeding purposes at competitive prices in closer partnership with LGC Genomics