Wheat research received a booster shot recently thanks to software developments and a gene mapping database funded by the Western Grains Research Foundation Endowment Fund.
Wheat breeders can now make genetic comparisons with the click of a mouse, 
rather than having to search through binders of data.
Daryl Somers, director of applied genomics at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre in Vineland Station, Ont., was working at Agriculture Canada’s Cereal Research Centre in Winnipeg when he led the project.

”We were generating quite a lot of data related to DNA fingerprinting or plant genotyping” he said in a news release. “We were using that data to develop genetic maps of wheat and it occurred to me at the time that we didn’t have any great software tools to manage that data or to give easier access to the data.

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“We had a lot of hard copies of this information in many binders of paper in the lab. It was well organized, but when you needed a piece of information you had to get a binder down and have a look.”


Somers and bioinformaticist Travis Banks from the Agriculture Canada Cereal Research Centre in Winnipeg collaborated to develop software to make the research easier. The project focused on hard red spring wheat and durum, producing a reference database for wheat breeders.


“It’s software that is graphical, that allows us to compare genetic maps, side by side. That’s an important feature,” he said.


