The ÓMICAS alliance, an international research program on multi-omics for crop breeding optimization

Area of Science:

• Plant Science
• Agricultural Technology
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• The OMICAS alliance, part of Colombia's Scientific Ecosystem (2017-2018), aims to enhance research and higher education.
• Focuses on a multi-scale, multi-institutional strategy for plant science discoveries and sustainable agriculture.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the OMICAS R&D architecture and strategy for crop breeding.
• To detail methods for elucidating omics hierarchy relationships and structure-function associations.
• To present recent progress, results, and future challenges in crop improvement.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing high-throughput, real-time phenotyping technologies for crop model characterization.
• Conducting experimental tissue characterization across epigenome, genome, proteome, and metabolome levels.
• Deriving in-silico models and tools from massive datasets to identify structure-function associations.

Main Results:

• Established a trans-disciplinary, multi-project R&D architecture for crop improvement.
• Successfully integrated multi-omics data with phenotyping for advanced crop breeding.
• Initiated the development of new germplasm with enhanced agricultural traits.

Conclusions:

• The OMICAS strategy effectively links multi-omics data to agricultural applications.
• Significant progress has been made in developing advanced crop varieties.
• Continued research is essential to address future challenges in sustainable agriculture.