Shared genotyping platform to achieve accelerated genetic gains in crop improvement in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia by enabling access to high throughput genotyping

In order to facilitate low-cost and high-throughput genotyping for CGIAR centers and Partner institutes including National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS), a research initiative was established as “High Throughput Genotyping Project (HTPG)” led by ICRISAT with support from IRRI and CIMMYT through Excellence in Breeding (EiB) Platform. This project is funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to offer low-cost access to world-class genotyping services for CGIAR institutes and NARS partners. Under the HTPG service agreement, more than 40 public institutions globally (16+ species) listed as key users for the SNPLine genotyping platform. Primary objective of the project is to broker access of the latest genotyping platform to a wide user group at a reduced cost ($1.50 to $2.00 per sample) via sample aggregation. HTPG platform offers SNPs genotyping services in rice, wheat, maize, several millets, legumes and other crops, which are readily deployable in the breeding programmes. It also offers value added services, i.e. capacity building in high throughput sampling, digitization, barcoding and data interpretation support at no cost to partners. It helps in generation of economical, faster and quality SNP data for all genomics-related activities. The initiative also ensures that the latest molecular advances across the community brought under a single shared platform to facilitate effective and high impact collaboration. Lowering the genotyping cost will enable CGIAR, NARS and other public sector breeders to utilize marker-based selection in forward breeding and routine QC application in breeding pipeline to expedite the delivery of improved breeding products to farmers globally.