By christelle.rabil@croptrust.org
6 February 2025

What was Genesys up to last year?

As of December 2024, Genesys held passport information on just over 4.4 million active accessions in international, regional, and national genebanks. In addition to passport data on accessions, genebanks use Genesys to share images, information on collection subsets, and trait data with associated crop trait descriptors.

The activities followed the 2024 Workplan, which was based on the guidance provided by the Genesys Advisory Committee and the Genesys Strategy 2023-2025. The primary objective in 2024 was to make Genesys available in other languages, while expanding the network of participating genebanks, and better informing users how to make best use of the platform.

 

Figure: Genesys data providers in 2024.

Increasing the number of data providers

In 2024, three new genebanks signed the Genesys Data Provider Agreement and uploaded data to Genesys: GBioS (Benin), ICTA (Guatemala), ADRON (Suriname).

The support of the BOLD project to national genebanks includes publishing data in Genesys. We completed the on-boarding of BOLD partners Egypt, Uganda, Laos, Lebanon and Tanzania in 2024 and added data from other genebanks as part of their Svalbard safety duplication activities. Read more on BOLD partners’ achievements with regards to Genesys in this dedicated article.

Data publishing

By December 2024, 86% of 4.4 million active accessions were updated. Most of these updates were from EURISCO, CGIAR, Embrapa and USDA. A further 4% were last updated in 2023 and are still considered to be up to date.

The Crop Trust organized a number of online training events to support data providers and encourage them to publish more data: 

• Three webinars on trait data upload were delivered on February 2, 20 and 29, attended by a total of 56 genebank staff from 40 institutes. Recordings are available on the Crop Trust YouTube channel.

• Two webinars on uploading passport data were delivered on April 4 and 30. The recording of the first is available on Youtube.

In total, 70 genebank staff received Genesys training through webinars, and 59 received Genesys training  through workshops, from a grand total of 58 genebanks.

Embedded Genesys

In 2024, IRRI, AfricaRice, IRRI, Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT and the Genolink project started using Embedded Genesys, joining NACGRAB, IITA, ILRI, WorldVeg, and ICBA. Maintenance and development of Embedded Genesys continued and the latest version is 1.7.0.

Maintaining and developing Genesys 

We now have Genesys i in Spanish and French! The initial translation of the website framework, followed by the content, was announced in July. 

You can now use AI to make searching Genesys easier. Genesys enabled natural language search queries (e.g. “find wild rice from India that is available for distribution at IRRI”) in October 2024:

 

Integration and interaction between GGCE and Genesys was also improved in 2024.

That’s only a selection of what Genesys was up to in 2024! Stay tuned for our full 2024 report and 2025 plans.