Stichting Wageningen Research
— WR —
Since nearly a century, Wageningen University & Research (of which Stichting Wageningen Research forms part) has been involved in research in the domain of healthy food and living environment. As such, it has built up a reputation of performing high quality interdisciplinary research, with an international orientation, in close collaboration with the users of the research results. Currently, it has over 10,000 students and 3,000 staff members. Stichting Wageningen Research consists of a number of leading, specialised institutes for applied research in this domain. Within WR, the Centre for Genetic Resources, the Netherlands (CGN) carries out specific ‘statutory research tasks’ for the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality. CGN is a leading centre of expertise in Europe and globally for the conservation and use of genetic diversity in crops, farm animals, trees and shrubs. CGN carries out methodological research, and participates actively in national, European and global organisations and networks. CGN staff represent the Dutch government in the respective networks EUFORGEN, ECPGR and ERFP for forest, plant and animal genetic resources. CGN collaborates actively with the private breeding industry and national NGO’s, and supports the Dutch government in the field of policy development and implementation. CGN has a long-lasting record of accomplishment of coordination and participation in EU projects. Because of this CGN has a unique position in Europe with an extensive network in the area of conservation and sustainable use of genetic resources. The Laboratory of Plant Breeding (LPB) of WR focuses on the characterisation, conservation and use of genetic material. LPB is building collections of plants, in particular Brassica, barley, potato, tomato, lily and rose. Furthermore, LPB is developing instruments for the detection, quantification and efficient utilisation of genetic variation for research into functional biodiversity and crop breeding. For this, LPB is working on methods to make plant breeding more efficient, such as molecular markers and other improved identification, selection and transformation methods. To support this research, LPB is developing statistical and computer programmes to enable the efficient use of all data that are generated by LPB for crop breeding.
Role within AGENT
WR is involved in WP2 (a European crop GenRes diversity atlas of wheat and barley) and WP3 (a European atlas of phenotypic information on GenRes), to which it contributes 500 accessions of wheat and 500 of barley for genotyping purposes and the establishment of wheat and barley precision collections, while it also participates in the utilization of phenotypic legacy data. WR is task leader in the bioinformatics work organized in WP5 (Development of standards and technology for data-interoperability) and WP6 (GenRes data infrastructure). WR also participates in WP7 (Promoting use, sharing resources, capacity building and outreach), in which it leads the task on genebank community capacity building and that on training and outreach.
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