Plant Breeding Ontology (PBO)

What is PBO?

The PBO aims standardizing the terminology used by plant breeding-related professionals, such as seed growers, field testers, technical staff, and specially breeders. PBO has been developed since 2015. It got enriched by various kind of users (e.g. plant biologists).

PBO was originally maintained as a glossary (called PLABREGLO = Plant Breeding Glossary). PLABREGLO served a basis to continue building PBO.

PBO is crop/species/variety agnostic

PBO is semantically designed to accommodate the terminology supporting breeding activities across different organisms. Nevertheless, certain entries are organism specific.

PBO availability

PBO was available as a flat excel file. Later on, PBO became available in OBO format, so that the connectivity with other bio-ontologies (such as the Crop Ontology) could be performed much more smoothly. Nowadays, PBO is mainly available in OBO format and in RDF format (the later still under major remodelling). You can get a copy of PBO at this address: add link

How can I contribute to PBO?

Feedback is very welcome at any level (e.g. terminology, definitions, categorisation, ...). Please contact directly Erick Antezana.

PBO at the BioHackathon 2018

PBO underwent a major refinement during the BioHackathon. PBO has in particular grown by including many new related terms, which were added automatically. Thus, manual curation is still needed. The domains that got automatically enriched are:

• genes / function
• genetic events
• organisms
• breeding methods

Several use cases and competency questions were collected. You can find below some competency questions:

• Which breeding methods are related to 'male sterility'?
• Which are the (breeding) methods of trait introduction?
• How else is the 'biolistic' method known?
• How is the term 'inbred line' known in spanish, french, dutch and german?

Next steps

During the BioHackathon 2018, PBO has reached a next level of improvement. Nevertheless, it still needs further refinement. The semantic data representation will continue evolving. More data (entries) are expected to get integrated (e.g. phenotyping).