Washington State University has been awarded a five-year $2 million grant to build and maintain a national system for sharing digital plant genetic resources. It will be known as the National Research Support Project 10. Forty scientists at 12 universities across the country are collaborating in the project.

The system will support research for 24 crops. WSU bioinformaticist Dr. Dorrie Main, who is heading the project, said it will involve organizing, storing, analyzing, and integrating petabytes of data to make them accessible to scientists working in genomic research and breeding nationwide. A petabyte is a million gigabytes.