DS team present BrAPI Hackathon outputs

Stephanie Manrilla
June 18, 2025

LOS BAÑOS, Philippines — The last day of the week-long Breeding Application Programming Interface (BrAPI) Hackathon held at the International Rice Research Institute Headquarters’ (IRRI HQ) from 02 to 06 June 2025 was dedicated to the community members’ project presentations.

During the closing session of the Hackathon, a total of 13 project outputs were presented by various development teams from PhenoApps, Plant Genome, Artemis, BreedBase, and Digital Solutions (DS), to name a few.

The presentations revolved around how the respective teams built on each other’s work to produce the Hackathon outputs. Albert Crisostomo (Core Breeding Software Engineering Specialist) and Jaymar Bantay (Core Breeding Software Engineering Senior Specialist) began the presentation for the DS team. Collaborating with other DS team members, initial backend work was done to support the capture, storage, and syncing of plot-level images from Field Book to the Enterprise Breeding System (EBS) and vice versa.

 

 

Eugene Sumague (Core Breeding Software Engineering Specialist) shed light on some of the errors encountered while using the Field Book app. These reported bugs were resolved, together with Chaney Courtney of PhenoApps.

Dinia Grace Gepte (Breeding Analytics Software Engineering Senior Specialist) demonstrated the single-trial phenotypic data exchange between EBS and Bioflow, while Marinell Quintana (Breeding Analytics Requirement Analyst) discussed the workflow involved in passing genotypic and sample data between the two applications.

 

 

Maria Pasang (Core Breeding Software Engineering Senior Specialist) discussed the DS team’s post-hackathon plan, which included exploring Intercross and Artemis:Ona, as well as processing historical data from EBS to Bioflow and Query Breeding Management Systems (QBMS).

Kate Dreher (DS GUS-General Support Lead & CIMMYT Germplasm Data Curator) outlined the exploratory discussions she had with the BrAPI, Germinate, QBMS, and Bioflow teams. James Clevenger (DS Solutions Engineering & Innovation Lead) also shared about the exploratory work being done to support voice recordings as a method of field data collection.

On opening day, community updates from the DS team were shared by Maria Relliza Pasang, Core Breeding Senior Specialist, Dinia Grace Gepte, Breeding Analytics Senior Specialist, and James Clevenger, Solutions Engineering & Innovation Lead.

This year’s IRRI-hosted BrAPI Hackathon was made possible through the coordination efforts of Jahzeel Calosa (Solutions Engineering & Innovation Lead for IRRI) and Novelyn Batan (Regional Operations Coordination Officer for SEA-IRRI).

EBS is a key product delivered by the DS unit of Breeding Resources (BR)—one of the five interconnected Areas of Work of the newly launched CGIAR Science Program: Breeding for Tomorrow (B4T).

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