Recent progress in sequencing technologies has produced several large scale data sets for crops. The insights gained by this data have been published in high profile scientific articles, but the underlying raw genotype data and the associated sample and population metadata have not been routinely submitted to appropriate archives. The aim of this implementation study is to provide this wealth of data according to FAIR principles ensuring an interoperable link with the phenotypic data that is stored in distributed institutional repositories which is crucial for accelerated crop breeding. A sustainable toolbox will be created to submit data to the ELIXIR deposition database “European Variation Archive” (EVA) and to enrich the data with interoperable metadata regarding plant data standards like “Multi-Crop Passport Descriptor” (MCPD) and “Minimal Information About a Plant Phenotyping Experiment (MIAPPE).

The study is a joint effort of ELIXIR France (Cyril Pommier, Anne-Francoise Adam-Blondon, Nacer Mohellibi, Manuel Ruiz), ELIXIR Germany (Uwe Scholz, Heidrun Gundlach, Klaus F.X. Mayer), ELIXIR the Netherlands (Richard Finkers), ELIXIR Belgium (Frederik Coppens, Bert Droesbeke) and EMBL-EBI (Cristina Yenyxe, Gonzalez Garcia, Melanie Courtot, Bruno Contreras-Moreira, Marc Rosello).