Rijk Zwaan（ライク・ズワーン）社、Genedata Selectorを導入：高品質かつ革新的な野菜品種の開発を加速

オランダのグローバルな種苗会社が、アグリサイエンス分野における研究開発のワークフローをデジタル化し、スケールアップと効率化を実現

December 20, 2022
Basel

Genedata, a globally leading provider of advanced software solutions for life science research and development, and Rijk Zwaan, a globally leading vegetable breeding company, today announced a partnership to digitalize R&D workflows and accelerate the development of new vegetable varieties. Rijk Zwaan will deploy the Genedata Selector^® platform worldwide to support its agriscience data management initiatives, in particular, to harmonize data access, facilitate global collaboration, and speed up breeding processes using innovative technologies.  

“The intelligent organization of large volumes of complex data is central to breeding tailored and resistant vegetables," says Prof. Ben Scheres, Ph.D., Research Manager, Biotechnology at Rijk Zwaan. "Implementing the Genedata Selector Platform allows our scientists to easily search, retrieve and analyze complex genomic information and efficiently make decisions on which new vegetable crossings produce the best offspring. Genedata Selector seamlessly integrates with our internal computational infrastructure and provides a “single source of truth” for any biological entity, accelerating the development of new high-quality vegetable varieties with beneficial traits for worldwide distribution. It also globally democratizes our R&D data and enables efficient collaborative work across disparate geographic locations and time zones.”  

The Genedata–Rijk Zwaan collaboration focuses on the efficient capture, processing, and analysis of genomic data to discover and develop commercially favorable vegetable traits. The cloud-based deployment of Genedata Selector integrates with Rijk Zwaan’s computational infrastructure and provides secure global data access to multidisciplinary teams according to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles, thus enabling efficient collaboration and harmonized data analytical workflows.

Seed breeding companies are increasingly adopting omics technologies such as NGS (Next-Generation Sequencing) and applying gene editing to continuously develop new advantageous, high-quality crops. Structured genotype-phenotype data are prerequisites for artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives for breeding to deliver tailored varieties with a shorter time to market.
Cloud-based deployment addresses the need for performance scalability and flexibility. 
For 25 years, Genedata has provided software and scientific support fostering innovation in Life Science R&D, through domain expertise to implement best practices across the Agriscience and Biopharma industries.

“We are excited about our partnership with Rijk Zwaan to digitalize their R&D processes and accelerate their breeding programs based on our Genedata Selector platform”, said Dr. Othmar Pfannes, CEO of Genedata. “Genedata remains committed to supporting innovative leaders like Rijk Zwaan, with our scalable end-to-end and integrated bioinformatics enterprise platform, cloud hosting, and consulting services. We aim to empower scientists at companies like Rijk Zwaan to leverage state-of-the-art technologies to deliver new products faster to the market.” 

About Rijk Zwaan

Rijk Zwaan is a family-owned vegetable breeding company. It is the number 4 company in the global vegetable seed market. Rijk Zwaan develops vegetable varieties and sells the seeds produced from them. It combines the huge genetic diversity that nature has to offer with continuous investment in R&D (approx. 30% of the annual turnover). This results in vegetable varieties with ever-better combinations of desired traits. To align its products perfectly with market requirements, the company maintains close contact not only with growers but also with the rest of the vegetable chain. Rijk Zwaan takes a personal approach and strives for win-win situations and long-term partnerships.