Genebank mining with FIGS, the Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy

As the world moves forward into an uncertain future our agro-ecosystems will come under increasing pressure, threatening our food security. In fact, climate change, dwindling water supplies, rising energy costs, the emergence of new pests and diseases, loss of arable land and population growth mean that our crop plants will need to yield more on less land, with fewer inputs under increasingly harsh conditions. For this reason, plant breeders will be forced to mine global plant genetic resources collections for variation that can be used to future-proof our crop plants. However, the genetic resources collections are large and we cannot afford to evaluate every accession in a collection as we hunt for desirable traits. The Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS) was developed to help unlock the variation in genebanks and make it more accessible to the plant breeding community. This paper explains how FIGS works and gives examples of how rare traits have been uncovered by using the technology.