CGN Managed Crop Portals
As information about plant genetic resources (PGR) is generally made available by the suppliers of these PGR, it is very supply oriented saying ‘this is what we have and this is how you can get it’. We at CGN – one of those suppliers - believe that the potential users might not be that interested in what we have but rather in what they need.
In the Crop Portals we try to shift focus and take the user perspective, answering the questions that a specific user group might have such as ‘Where can I find material of the crop I am working on, under what conditions can I obtain it and what should I do and who should I contact?’ or ‘I’m looking for material with this specific trait (e.g. resistance to a disease), where can I find information about it?’. We try to answer this irrespective of our own collections or our own data.
So far we created a Crop Portal for lettuce (aimed at lettuce breeders and scientists) and potato (aimed at potato breeders and scientists).