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BASF ramps up partnership with NSIP on predictive breeding

BASF’s vegetable seeds business and Nature Source Improved Plants (NSIP) have announced a closer collaboration than before to work on their cucumber, pepper and tomato breeding programs.

A genetics and breeding technology supplier, NSIP has been an external collaborator since 2008 – but as of July 1 it has intensified this global partnership.

Under the terms of the multi-year agreement, NSIP will work closely with selected breeding teams, applying their extensive bank of algorithms to improve data driven decision making throughout the breeding and selection process.

“By applying these algorithms with additional phenotyping, our breeding teams will improve the output of our predictive breeding efforts,” says Johan Warringa, Head of R&D EMEA, Vegetable Seeds, BASF. Predictive breeding brings together tools such as phenotyping, genomic selection, and statistics to help breeders make data driven predictions of which lines will perform best in a given situation.

“Of course, we are also working on genomic selection in-house, but NSIP brings important additional expertise and their unique Operation Research based approach to breeding and statistical algorithms. By partnering with NSIP, we are launching forward in several areas where they can apply their existing expertise and that allows us to better focus on other key areas with our own research,” says Jan van den Berg, Scouting & Collaboration Management, Bioscience Research, BASF.

Read the full release here