The ATPBR Foundation is a registered non-profit organization based in India that collaborates with the seed industry, institutions, NGOs, and government bodies to provide training in plant breeding and develop future-ready plant breeders. It is India leading networking training organization with expertise and resources for capacity building, market linkages, policy advocacy, and project management. The main objective of ATPBR is to develop a sustainable and thriving agricultural system that serves farmers, supports emerging entrepreneurs, and assists industries in building market-driven competencies in human resources. ATPBR is open to collaborating with a diverse range of organizations, academic and research institutions, NGOs, independent professionals, and aspires to meet the intellectual needs to make crop improvement an attractive and lucrative domain for all concerned.
The ATPBR WebCon series is a platform that brings eminent plant breeders who have achieved success in plant breeding and other related areas such as policy and administration, to meet practicing and potential plant breeders regularly every month. These web-based conferences have been highly successful, as evidenced by the large number of participants from India and outside of India. The WebCon series captures the presentations in a published format, which includes the key messages delivered by the speakers, and are available on the ATPBR website.
ATPBR is bringing eminent plant breeders who have achieved laurels in not just science of plant breeding, but have excelled in other related areas like policy, administration, etc., to meet practicing and potential plant breeders on a platform called ATPBR Webinar series regularly every month. These Web-based Conferences (WebCon) have been hugely successful as seen by the numbers of participants from India and outside of India. The WebCon series captures the presentations in a published format which includes key messages delivered by the speakers.
At the outset, I need to state that I am not a horticultural specialist and whatever horticulture knowledge have, is gained on the job and I am a plant genetic resources specialist with an interest in biodiversity and have worked across Asia. Today we will be mainly talking about tropical fruits and, in particular, tropical fruit tree genetic resources. If you look at tree fruits as a group, it includes a large number of species, unlike in field crops, e.g., rice, wheat, maize, etc., where just a few species are involved in each crop. Here we are talking about a group of species under each fruit tree. While talking about them, certain generalizations have to be made. Also, there are many unexploited species which are waiting to be discovered for human usage and exploitation, and there is hardly any genetic information available about them.
