Agronomix host their largest software training course in Adelaide, Australia.
Agronomix Software conducted their largest software training course, in Adelaide, Australia in July with 45 attendees learning more about Genovix.
The course covered the variety testing system, Genovix Mobile® for offline data entry, the plant breeding and seed inventory modules and all their integration as one complete end-to-end system with diverse analytical tools including R analysis such as BLUP. The course was designed to give all trainees basic proficiency in Genovix whilst following a ‘typical’ year for a variety testing and breeding program, enhanced by interaction with experienced plant breeders.
Dr James Edwards, Wheat breeder with Australian Grain Technologies, reflected on the course:
“I recently attended the Genovix training course held in Adelaide, South Australia, with 25 of my colleagues. The course was led by Dieter Mulitze, with assistance from Jia Sun. The five-day course provided an introduction to the extensive tools and functionality provided by the Genovix software to plant breeders. The course logically worked from managing genotypes and treatments, to designing experiments and nurseries, to managing and analysing data and finally to managing seed lots. As a very happy AGROBASE user of more than 15 years, after the five-day Genovix course I’m now very excited about migrating our research data from AGROBASE to Genovix.”
Trainees from Australian seed companies, government organizations, and the university reflect the strong and growing Genovix user base in Australia. Indeed, the response from the course was so positive that some organizations indicated they would be sending trainees for the 2024 Adelaide course.
Many trainees, including Dr Liu, remarked on Genovix’s ease-of-use and intuitiveness as well as new capabilities beyond the former AGROBASE. Dr Shiming Liu, Principal Research Scientist and Cotton breeder, CSIRO Australia, one of the trainees, commented on Genovix:
“As discussed during the course, l feel Genovix is much easier for people to learn and to use, whether new or experienced, given its very user friendly and better visualized interface. Different aspects in Genovix are flowing and streamlining better, and it also becomes more flexible and capable to accommodate various requirements of breeders or breeding programs for different crops. They should help breeders to plan and organise breeding activities and manage the resources of breeding programs more efficiently. I am also impressed with the availability of many traditional and modern analytical tools and how easily they can be used. When used routinely, l feel they can help better decision making of the release of new varieties, better understanding of breeding target environments and diversity of breeding germ plasm”.
The significant response to this course shows that people prefer on-site personal training where they can connect with the instructors and form those crucial working relationships, in contrast to the COVID era when travel was restricted, and many organisations turned to online training.
The course instructors for the Adelaide 2023 course included Agronomix staff with PhDs in plant breeding – Dr Jia Sun, Breeding Software Professional and Dr Dieter Mulitze, Chief Science Officer.
