The Global Popcorn Project

The Global Popcorn Project began in 2014, by asking the basic question: How many popcorn accessions do we have in the Maize Collection of the CIMMYT Maize and Wheat Germplasm Bank? Six years later, we are closing in on answering that basic question and have also moved on to more complicated ones, with the help of an international team of graduate students and their supervising professors, from Mexico, Brazil and China. We are starting with the phenotyping guides (in English and Spanish) and the first data set compiled in 2014, using the methodology described in the manuals, and we will be continually updating this site with publications and their supporting data sets. Don’t miss the video of our phenotyping team in action!

This project was carried out as a collection-related activity of the Maize Collection in the CIMMYT Germplasm Bank, supported by the CGIAR Genebank Platform and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The graduate students involved in the project were supported during their internships in the germplasm bank as follows: Braulio Torres: Programa de Formación y Desarrollo de Científicos y Tecnólogos, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT-Mexico); Natalia Almeida: Programa Ciência sem Fronteiras - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq - Brazil) and Jing Li: Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC).