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Crop performance accelerated with Certus Jump Start

With worldwide shortages of food and changing weather patterns, there is ever-increasing demand for faster-growing, more abundant crops, with disease tolerance and the ability to grow in marginal soils.

Adelaide’s Plant Accelerator®, a world-leading facility, provides scientists with the latest technology in high throughput imaging of individual plant phenomics to help in hastening crop improvements. With Certus’ Jump Start, a user-friendly portal interface, the Plant Accelerator’s clients can sign in and view their data as it’s collected.

The Plant Accelerator offers state-of-the-art plant growth environments and the latest technology in automated, high throughput, non-destructive measurement of the physical and biochemical traits of plants (phenomics).

This 4500 square metre plant research and analysis facility, located at the University of Adelaide’s Waite Campus, is helping national and international academic and commercial plant scientists to understand and to relate the performance of particular plants to the genetic make-up of those plants.

Clients of the facility can organise a program of controlled conditions – e.g. light, moisture, soil type, temperature - to test how strains of particular plants perform.

In the past there have been problems reporting large and regular volumes of collected data back to the clients. Although the data is captured in an automated manner, it hasn’t been available that way. Data has usually been burnt to a device (such as a DVD) and then distributed to clients around the world. Data updates can become quite labour intensive. Clients can become frustrated with delays and lack of regular progress reports.

However, Plant Accelerator clients will soon be enabled for self-service.

Certus is currently installing Jump Start, a WebSphere portal solution that provides organisations with access to key company information no matter where they are located. Using a combination of WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Web Content Manager, Jump Start directly connects to the facility’s database to enable real time reporting.

Clients will be able to sign in and view their data as it is collected. A registered user can access all their Plant Accelerator projects, and see, analyse and view images right down to the individual plant.