Breeding Data Management & Experience of BMS deployment at ICRISAT

Research data management stands for use of appropriate experimental design and proper capturing, analysis, interpretation, publishing, archiving and sharing of data. Data management is critical for research organizations to ensure research quality and integrity. For public plant breeding programs proper data management has been a key challenge for various reasons and one of them is non-availability of public data management software platforms. Commercially available software are often expensive and non-affordable at NARS of developing countries. Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP) addressed this challenge by providing the state of art suite of software called Breeding Management System (BMS). It has several features including recording of pedigrees and tracking of genealogies, cross generation and advancing nurseries, generating field layouts and statistical analysis. BMS has been made available for public and commercial plant breeding organizations and can be installed either standalone or on enterprise cloud. Because of these and several other features, ICRISAT has decided to migrate breeding program data to BMS and adopt the software as the breeding management platform. We are establishing central cloud based BMS repository for the institute including multi-institutional projects such as TL-III and HOPE 2. This migration involves inventorying historical data, uploading pedigrees, digital data capture and barcoding. ICRISAT is developing APIs to link BMS to data platforms like Dataverse and a high throughput genotyping data management system under GOBII project. In this context, we have already started data migration at ICRISAT Headquarter in early 2015 and gradually rolling out to data from our locations in sub-Saharan Africa.