Ten traditional breeding programs at NDSU work closely with the team. Heilman-Morales is a plant breeder and data manager, and Walk is a plant scientist and platform administrator. The team develops tools to manage data and projects for all the stages of variety testing, data management, experiment creation, statistical analysis, selection and final reporting of results. Its interdepartmental and collaborative approach with other universities, non-profit organizations and industry strengthens NDSU breeding efforts.Īna Heilman-Morales and Tom Walk coordinate the pipeline breeding efforts and offer automated solutions to breeding programs with the help of statistician and mathematician Didier Murillo-Florez, all under the leadership of barley breeder and department head Richard Horsley. The team’s project is a centralized, dedicated effort that is focused on helping NDSU breeding programs.

The success of a plant breeding program depends on millions of data points collected from phenotypic observations of plants in the field, genetic and genomic information, biochemical measurements of physiological and food safety characteristics and quality factors of crop products. The Breeding Pipeline Database Management team in the NDSU Department of Plant Sciences is creating tools and platforms to speed and streamline the entire plant breeding process.