HarvestPlus and ICRISAT to support CGIAR biofortification strategy through elemental analysis
CGIAR Breeding Resources Initiative has established a partnership with HarvestPlus and ICRISAT to complement the elemental analysis services available as shared resources for CGIAR and its partners.
Story originally published in CGIAR
Biofortified varieties are bred from the highest-yielding crops, making them highly attractive to farmers. These varieties are also climate-smart, with many possessing drought and heat-resistant traits.
To develop the most micronutrient-enriched crops, breeders must accurately measure the nutrient content in the crops they work on. This is where analytical services play a crucial role.
CGIAR's Breeding Resource Initiative (BRI) addresses this challenge by aggregating demand from multiple breeding programs. This allows the Initiative to negotiate competitive phenotyping costs with standardized lab vendors, offering streamlined services along with application-oriented training and advice.
Through the new partnership between HarvestPlus XRF Services and ICRISAT's NIRS, Breeding Resource Initiative can now offer comprehensive elemental analyzes as shared services at the organizational level for CGIAR breeders and national partners. These enhanced services complement Breeding Resources’ Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) service, providing cost-effective nutritional analysis for elements such as zinc (Zn), iron (Fe), aluminum (Al), chromium (Cr), and titanium (Ti).
“We wanted to make elemental analysis more comprehensive, accessible, affordable, and efficient,” explains Rajaguru Bohar, Breeding Resources South Asia Lab Services Support Coordinator. “By integrating HarvestPlus XRF and ICRISAT NIRS technologies under our shared services umbrella, we allow CGIAR breeders and national partners working on biofortification to submit samples for elemental analysis to through our Service Request Portal.”
Eng Hwa, Head of Breeding Resources Services, emphasizes the importance of leveraging HarvestPlus and ICRISAT experience in biofortification. “This collaboration aims to capitalize on strategic advantages, particularly in the area of testing for nutritional traits, and to expand these efforts under the CGIAR umbrella so that more partners and crops can benefit,”.
“We recently organized a workshop on the two new service types now available for elemental analysis,” Bohar adds. “Participants acquired key competencies, such as sample preparation and best practices in elemental analyses to ensure the generation of quality data. We also assessed demand internally and among our national and private sector partners.”
200,000 samples have been mapped for top micronutrient traits (Fe, Zn, Ca, protein, and PVA) in rice, wheat, maize, and millets. Additionally, 100,000 more samples are planned for other important crops such as pigeonpea, soybean, chickpea, and groundnut.
Further training sessions and a webinar launch are also scheduled to promote these services’ availability.
NIRS and XRF: what are they?
Under the Breeding Resources-negotiated agreement, new NIRS and XRF services are available to CGIAR, as well as to public and private partners.
Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) services will be provided by the Facility for Exploratory Research on Nutrition (FERN) hosted at ICRISAT, facilitated via Breeding Resources’ global shared services. NIRS is used to analyse organic compositional traits such as protein, fat, oil, and fatty acids. This method is rapid, cost-effective, non-destructive, and requires minimal sample preparation. It allows for simultaneous multi-component analysis, includes a double layer of quality control, and has robust, tested calibration—enabling large-scale analysis.
X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry is a non-destructive analytical technique used to determine the elemental composition of materials. XRF analysers identify the chemistry of a sample by measuring the fluorescent X-rays emitted when the sample is excited by a primary X-ray source. XRF offers low-cost, rapid phenotyping services and will be provided by HarvestPlus to potential users globally. HarvestPlus lab facilities, with locations in India, Rwanda, and Bangladesh, have the capacity to analyze over 40,000 samples per lab annually.
Breeding Resource Services (BRS) are not isolated efforts: they are supported by a dedicated process improvement team, Business Process Management (BPM). BPM meticulously documents each step—from service requests to data delivery—ensuring that the process is well-defined and standardized. The services are harmonized across various capacities, resulting in consistent and comparable data, which is crucial for cross-Center or cross-crop group analysis. Both ICRISAT NIRS and HarvestPlus XRF Labs are working toward achieving a quality management system with BPM’s support.
All partners involved have agreed to conduct an inter-laboratory proficiency test for XRF and NIRS in 2025. Coordinated by HarvestPlus, this will further improve laboratory accuracy and efficiency across the region, supported by the collaboration with Breeding Resources.
Written by Julie Puech, Accelerated Breeding and Breeding Resources Initiatives. Main image: ICRISAT and Indian partner breeders being trained on Elemental Analysis, August 2024, Patancheru. Credit: ICRISAT/CGIAR.
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This work aligns with SDGs 2, 3 & 17.
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