ICARDA Supports Smarter Tools for Better Crop Breeding
ICARDA is proud to contribute to the ongoing development of Bioflow, CGIAR’s open-source breeding analytics pipeline, developed under the Crops to End Hunger initiative.
Bioflow provides NARES with immediate access to cutting-edge analytical methods and an integrated suite of tools that implement the CGIAR Breeding Analytics team's recommendations and best practices. It streamlines and standardizes data analysis pipelines across CGIAR centers and NARES breeding programs, enabling faster data-driven decision-making, reducing human error, and offering quick access to performance metrics, freeing up scientists to focus on innovation and the development of new breeding methodologies.
ICARDA’s strategic role in Bioflow underscores our commitment to empowering national breeding programs through innovation and capacity building. As a key contributor to Bioflow’s fast-track development team, ICARDA is helping deliver a scalable, user-friendly analytics platform that enables NARES to adopt standardized, data-driven breeding workflows. This initiative directly supports ICARDA’s mandate to strengthen national systems and showcases our leadership in delivering high-impact digital tools that accelerate genetic gains and foster scientific self-reliance at the national level.
As part of this collaborative process, ICARDA’s Khaled Al-Sham’aa has led the development of a new cloud-based storage feature, in partnership with the Enterprise Breeding System (EBS) team. This new functionality allows users to securely store their analysis results directly on the cloud, enhancing accessibility and eliminating challenges related to bandwidth limitations and local storage constraints.
“Bioflow’s calculations already run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers. By moving storage to the cloud, even users with limited computing power will be able to perform all their tasks online, from running analyses to storing results. This is precisely the main goal of Bioflow: to fill gaps in computing capacity and standardize research quality,” he explained.
With this upgrade, Bioflow becomes more accessible and scalable, particularly for users in low-resource settings, aligning with the tool’s mission to democratize high-quality analytics and support faster, more informed decision-making in plant breeding.
Crops to End Hunger is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), commissioned by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) through the Fund for International Agricultural Research (FIA).
Read more: Bioflow gets smarter with new modules and cloud features - CGIAR
Bioflow, the CGIAR Breeding Analytics Pipeline video tutorial