Designing Crops for Global Food Security

Rapid advances on genomic sciences of our major crops are revolutionizing the way we perform plant breeding through marker-assisted selection and genomic breeding. The world of genomics is highly digital. However, phenotyping of crop plants is essentially analog at this point. Most of it is still done by human observation. While analog breeding utilizes experience and intuition, it limits our ability to search, to apply analytics and to increase the throughput of phenotypic analysis. Although this is a very complex challenge, phenotyping of our major crops will become routinely digitized in the next 10 years. This will enable geneticists around the world to perform functional genomics at speeds hitherto unimagined.  It will also lead to genomic design of crops in which the most desirable alleles are concentrated into elite germplasm using computationally optimized breeding strategies. As with genomics, these tools will be available to breeders anywhere with access to the internet.