The genomic characterization of entire genebank collections around the world is creating a vast amount of data for plant genetic resources (PGRs) including wheat. To fully unlock their potential for crop genetic improvement, it is important to make PGR data accessible in ways that facilitate their use in breeding and research.

The Australian Grains Genebank (AGG) Strategic Partnership between Agriculture Victoria and the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) is transforming the AGG from a traditional seedbank into a future-oriented bio-digital resource centre. A key part of its program is to develop digital tools to enable the Australian grains industry to unlock the genetic potential of PGRs conserved within the AGG. This is being achieved through an industry driven co-design, co-develop, co-deliver model, where industry input is used to define use-cases that describe how they want to interrogate PGR data to facilitate the selection of PGRs to address research and breeding questions.

Here, we provide examples of digital tools and functionality currently developed to facilitate industry use of PGRs in breeding and research. Lamington, a Shiny application implementing CoreHunter3, was developed to simplify the selection of PGR core sets based on user-defined criteria. Pretzel, an interactive webtool for visualising multidimensional datasets from the scale of the nucleotide to pangenome, provides functionality that enables PGR genotype data to be seamlessly linked to research and breeding knowledge.

The digital tools being developed aim to provide genebank users without specialised bioinformatics skills with access to PGR data in formats that will facilitate their selection and optimal use in breeding and research.