T3: A Crop Database to Facilitate Collaboration and Accelerate Discovery.

Climate change will lead to more variable environments, making evaluation of breeding lines in many environments critical for accurate evaluation. Evaluation in many environments requires collaboration. A crop database that centralizes submissions from participants and facilitates curation, validation, and formatting of data makes data analysis a relative breeze. The agronomic traits that breeders are most interested in are generally quantitative. Identification of DNA polymorphisms using genome wide analyses require large numbers of observations on as many lines as possible. Again, the production and assembly of such datasets requires collaboration, and a centralized database simplifies the data exchanges that are entailed. Finally, analysis tools that can be applied readily to the data will increase the chance that it will be interpreted in useful ways. Thus, a data environment that is also rich in analysis possibilities will further accelerate discovery. Aspects of these three components, namely, collaboration, big data, and analysis tools will be illustrated using The Triticeae Toolbox (T3), which is the central data repository of the Triticeae Coordinated Agricultural Project.