NUCNet member Dr Guillermina Mendiondo, Assistant Professor, Plant and Crop Sciences in Translational Agriculture, University of Nottingham would like to share this publication with members.
Diversifying our food systems: New data framework makes nutritional information on underutilised crops more accessible
An international team including researchers at the University of Nottingham, the James Hutton Institute, Southern Cross University (Australia), and Crops for the Future (CFF UK) has developed an open-data framework designed to make it easier to find, compare, and reuse nutritional data on crops, including “underutilised crops” that could help diversify food systems and improve nutrition worldwide. The work was led by first author and PhD candidate Agnes Aboagye, supervised by Dr Guillermina Mendiondo at the University of Nottingham.
Crop nutrition data is scattered across many sources worldwide, often recorded in inconsistent formats that are difficult to compare or search together. The team’s ontology-based data access and integration (OBDI) framework addresses this by linking existing datasets through a shared scientific vocabulary, creating a “knowledge graph” that lets researchers query and compare crop nutrition data without needing to move or duplicate it.
By placing data on underutilised crops alongside major staples like wheat and rice within this shared structure, the framework may help researchers identify genetic resources with strong nutritional potential that are currently difficult to find, supporting evidence-based crop diversification and, longer term, more accessible tools for crop and nutrition research.
“What we’ve built is a common language that lets nutritional data from very different sources talk to each other — and that helps us spot opportunities in crops that have been historically overlooked.”
— Agnes Aboagye, University of Nottingham
The paper, “Improving Annotation, Access, and Comparison of Nutritional Composition Data for Underutilised Crops,” is published in Database https://doi.org/10.1093/database/baag050
Authors: Agnes Aboagye, Paul D. Shaw, Sebastian Raubach, Sean Mayes¹, Graham King and Guillermina M. Mendiondo
This work was supported by a DTP BBSRC PhD Scholarship (Grant Reference: BB/T0083690/1), with additional support from Crops for the Future (CFF UK). Further funding was provided by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme through the project “Realising Dynamic Value Chains for Underutilised Crops” (RADIANT).
