'Plant Breeding: Sustaining the Future' Abstracts of the XVIth EUCARPIA Congress, Edinburgh, Scotland, 10-14 September 2001 BIOINFORMATICS IN A PLANT BREEDING RESEARCH INSTITUTE J.M. SANDBRINK Plant Research International, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Plant breeding is an ancient human activity that has been very successful in the adjustment of plants to human needs. It is a constant process of recombining, testing and selecting genotypes. In recent years plant breeding has acquired the powerful diagnostic tools of molecular markers and genomics to enhance this continuous process. Data production in the field of molecular markers and genomics has gone up exponentially. This is why the scientific discipline bioinformatics has become indispensable to make biological sense of genomics data. I will describe the activities Plant Research International has undertaken in the field of bioinformatics and try to show the added value of bioinformatics as support for plant breeding genomic research.