Diversity Seek (DivSeek): An International Partnership to Harness the Genetic Potential of Crop Diversity.

More than 1,700 genebanks globally conserve approximately seven million accessions of crop species and their wild relatives. In addition, farmers conserve and adapt germplasm to social, economic and ecological conditions across diverse farming systems. The genetic diversity encapsulated in all these materials underpins and drives crop improvement. Yet efforts to identify and mobilize beneficial genetic variation into breeding programs have been limited, compared to the size of this global resource. Game-changing ‘omics’ and ‘big data’ technologies now enable a more effective and broad-based approach to harnessing crop diversity. The recently launched Diversity Seek initiative (DivSeek; http://www.divseek.org) aims to capture this opportunity to accelerate the development of climate-ready, high-yielding and nutritious varieties for a growing global population. DivSeek provides a platform to generate synergies and add value to like-minded, but otherwise autonomous efforts by germplasm holders, breeders, geneticists, and database and computational experts to make crop diversity more readily accessible and usable. It is a community-driven initiative based on voluntary membership, which focuses on common challenges encountered by individual projects. Priority areas of work will include (i) the establishment of a ‘cross-crop meeting platform’ to share experiences and rapidly spread innovative research approaches and techniques, (ii) the development and advocacy of common data standards and interoperable data sets/repositories, (iii) a broadly accepted framework for ‘rights management’ that helps individual projects comply with data-sharing principles, and (iv) capacity-building efforts in these areas. We welcome colleagues and organizations interested in mining crop diversity for food security to join the growing group of the 60-some institutions that have come together to establish DivSeek.