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May 2024 Meeting Summary

We gathered on May 10th to look back at a productive 2023 and set our sights on the goals for 2024. It was a wonderful opportunity to review our achievements and discuss how we can continue to evolve the Genesys platform to better serve the global community.

Who joined us​

We were happy to have:

  • Chris Richards (USDA, USA) - Chair
  • Francisco Lopez (ITPGRFA, FAO)
  • Peter Wenzl (Alliance Bioversity-CIAT, CGIAR)
  • Sunil Archak (NBPGR, India)
  • Stephan Weise (IPK, Germany)
  • Luigi Guarino (Crop Trust)
  • Sarada Krishnan (Crop Trust)
  • Christelle Rabil and Matija Obreza (Genesys Team, Crop Trust)

We missed Semíramis Rabelo Ramalho Ramos (Embrapa, Brazil), who couldn't make it this time.

Celebrating 2023's wins​

Matija shared some great news from the past year. We welcomed thirteen new genebanks into the Genesys family and saw some exciting technical milestones, like the release of the Subsetting Tool in the first quarter and the launch of trait-based searching in the third.

We're also seeing a great trend in data freshness, with 81% of accessions now up-to-date! Beyond the tools, we've been busy supporting 36 genebanks through workshops and webinars, and we're thrilled that five partners have already integrated Embedded Genesys into their own websites.

One highlight from our discussions was the news about funding for an online publications database. This will allow us to link articles directly to accessions and institutes, integrated with GLIS DOIs, a big step forward in making research more accessible.

The road ahead for 2024​

Our focus for 2024 is all about accessibility and deepening our partnerships. We're working hard to make Genesys available in several UN languages (Simplified Chinese, French, Russian, Arabic, and Spanish) as well as Brazilian Portuguese. We're also adding a citations database to help researchers give credit where it's due.

While we aren't actively hunting for new providers this year, we're dedicating our energy to ensuring that the partners who joined us in 2023 are fully onboarded and supported.

Evolving our Committee​

As some of our members' terms come to an end, we've been thinking about how to keep our strategic compass diverse and balanced. We're excited that Chris has agreed to extend his membership and continue as our Chair! We're also looking into extending Sunil's term.

To keep the Committee fresh and inclusive, we've decided to open future meetings to observers. This will help us bring in new perspectives, perhaps from the breeding or industry side, while ensuring we maintain a good regional and gender balance.

Sharing our vision in Morocco​

Matija recently had the chance to present the work of the Genebank Information Systems team to the Crop Trust Executive Board in Morocco. The Board was very supportive of our efforts to improve data management and accessibility.

This sparked an interesting conversation about how to get more breeders using Genesys. We acknowledged that there's often a gap between the long-term inventory focus of genebanks and the fast-paced KPIs of breeding programs. Rather than trying to jump directly to breeders, we're exploring the idea of engaging with pre-breeding programs and researchers focused on trait discovery as a more natural bridge.