Putting Genetics to Work
Mike Carson, the Business Development Manager at Gemnetics is writing a short article series about breeding topics arising from the perspective that he and Sue Carson have developed during their (combined) 79 years involvement in forest tree breeding.
Mike has until recently used Gemview on a daily basis to track his trial breeding data and view trends and relationships in order to increase the productivity of the Forest Genetics breeding and clonal deployment program. Mike and Sue continue to use Gemview for similar breeding work with both African mahogany and NZ manuka.
Mike's articles will be published on our Gem news page. If you would like to contact Mike to comment or share your own insights, please contact him through our contact us page, or directly through Mike's Linkedin profile.
A 2012 breeding review for Papua New Guinea’s sustainable palm oil producer has led to a valuable long-term partnership between Gemnetics and New Britain Palm Oil . Through this partnership, NBPOL are breaking new ground in ‘in-time’ analysis of oil palm progeny data.
It quickly became evident that Gemnetics could provide a solution to the problem NBPOL were facing. Although NBPOL already had an efficient data capture and storage system, they did not have the flexibility to enable rapid and efficient ‘mining’ of the breeding data to support key breeding and deployment decisions required by the company. Gemnetics was challenged to provide “data at our fingertips”. Implementation followed quickly, combining frequent online interactions with reciprocal site visits and training.
Gemnetics principals on site with NBPOL staff.
The utility of Gemview for NBPOL queries has been successively improved over several years of very fruitful collaboration. This has included customisation of Gemview to extract breeding data in different ways. For example, palms produce their fruit continuously throughout the year, which is in contrast to most tree improvement programmes where a full trial measurement can be made at a specific point in time. As a result, Gemview now has the capability of easily storing, collating and summarizing data collected in palm trials throughout the year. Analyses and reports of bunch and fruit yields are produced covering user-defined time periods, enabling straightforward estimation of breeding values for the improved parent palms.
Gemnetics does not plan to ‘rest on its laurels’. Recent inclusion of extended pedigree analysis capability has further strengthened Gemview’s utility to tree and plant breeders. Gemnetics is also working with NBPOL to introduce the capability of running user-defined R script for the production of standard reports customised to meet client needs. Gemnetics is committed to a continuous programme of providing NBPOL with a high-quality database service, while also sharing enhancements with its other valued clients.
