Areas of Inquiry

CRCIL has three areas of inquiry which relate to germplasm enhancement. Discovery. Validation. Transfer.

The first area involves discovering alleles or haplotypes. This process may entail screening germplasm within seed banks to uncover alleles not utilized in existing breeding materials, which offer essential climate resilience traits. It may also involve incorporating traits from related species or exploring new allele functionalities through molecular techniques such as mutation breeding or gene editing.

The second area of inquiry concerns the validation of alleles or haplotypes. Following their discovery, it's crucial to thoroughly validate these alleles to confirm their contribution to climate resilience traits.

The third and final area of inquiry involves transferring validated alleles into elite germplasm materials. This critical step ensures that climate-resilient alleles are integrated into the plant breeder's toolkit, enabling the development and release of improved varieties for farmers' use.