In the context of its work on the Global Information System of Article 17, the Secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), in partnership with Bioversity International (Bioversity) and the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) , has supported the development of Genesys, a global portal providing access to information on germplasm accessions.

The overall goal of the portal is to provide users with improved access to the millions of accessions held in genebanks worldwide. In fact, information beyond the identifying passport data -traditionally available in online genebank systems- has been made available to plant breeders, scientists and other users.

The portal, presented at the Fourth Session of the Governing Body in Bali in 2011, publishes additional accession data, such as plant height, growing periods at given locations, seed color, response to specific pests or diseases, response to various climatic conditions and possible end uses needs to be readily available.

This type of information, often called characterization and evaluation data, along with environmental data based on the longitude and latitude at collection sites complements passport data currently available and rendering these genebank accessions more useful to plant breeders and scientists.

Genesys allows individuals to query accessions of interest according to simple criteria and keywords, but they can also make specific and independent queries. This is key to promoting the use of accession data for plant improvement as every researcher has individual and unique research needs.

The system is available at: http://www.genesys-pgr.org/