Public-Private Partnerships Beneficial to Crop Research

Public private-partnerships are beneficial to plant breeding research and can be advantageous to all the parties involved, said a group of researchers in the Netherlands. One of the benefits that private industries can derive from such venture includes the use of plant research materials that are closely related to the germplasm materials they use in-house. The academia may in turn benefit from the additional funding and resources from the industry.

The group provides as an example the collaborative activities in the tomato project of the Centre of Biosystems Genomics (CBG), in an article published in the journal Euphytica. They relate how industry-derived elite inbred germplasm of tomato was used to create new genetic resources utilized in academic research, and describe how this was achieved.

The paper can be accessed at http://www.springerlink.com/content/qn547t71p8752v12/.