Using the Cottongen Breeding Information Management System for Cotton Improvement

Fueled by rapid advances in large-scale genotyping and phenotyping, plant breeding programs have become increasingly “big data” intensive. To efficiently manage, integrate and utilize these huge data sets from both private and public data sources in breeding decision-making, we report progress on the Tripal Breeding Information Management System (BIMS) available in CottonGen.  BIMS allows individual breeders to integrate their phenotypic and genotypic data with public genomic and genetic data and at the same time have complete control of their own breeding data and access to tools such as data import/export, data analysis and data archive functionality. BIMS incorporates the use of an Android App Field Book, an open-source software for phones and tablets, which allows breeders to replace hard-copy field books, thus alleviating the possibility of transcription errors while providing faster access to the collected data. The use of Field Book and BIMS promotes the use and development of standard trait descriptors and metadata collection. The current functionality includes manage breeding, data import, search and download and basic statistical analysis components.