BRAPI, a Community-Based Effort for Standardizing Breeding Application Interfaces

As genome-based methods for breeding have been established over the last decade, breeding data storage needs have soared. Comprising sequence, marker, genotyping calls, phenotypic information, and trial metadata, the breeding data are relatively complex and potentially extremely voluminous. Most breeding data have been stored in custom database systems that have been created for different breeding programs and centers, often developed independently with little attention to compatibility with other systems. To leverage the power of these databases, we have organized the BRAPI consortium, consisting of major providers of public breeding database solutions as well as their users. The goal of BRAPI to create web-based application program interface (API) that can be used by breeder software providers as a standardized interface to breeding data, independent of the data source, making the creation of tools and the exchange of breeding data easier, as well as building a more tightly linked plant breeding software community.