The aim of the AGENT project, funded by the European Commission, is to develop a concept for the digital exploitation and activation of plant genetic resources (PGRs) throughout Europe [@doi:10.3390/plants10081557]. In the global system for ex situ conservation of PGRs, material is being conserved in about 1750 collections totalling ~5.8 million accessions [@doi:10.2135/cropsci2017.01.0014]. Unique and permanent identifiers in the form of DOIs are available for more than 1.7 million accessions via the Global Information System [@{https://glis.fao.org/glis/}] of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Each DOI is linked to some basic descriptive data that facilitates the use of these resources, mainly passport data. However, a data space beyond the most basic information is needed that includes genotypic and phenotypic data. This space will help to answer questions about the global biological diversity of plant species, the detection of duplicates, the tracking of provenance for the identification of genetic integrity, the selection of the most suitable material for different purposes, and to support further applications in the field of data mining or AI. In this context, the AGENT project will activate and utilize the PGRs from European ex situ genebanks according to the FAIR principles, and test the resources in practice using two important crops, barley and wheat [@doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.18]. Thirteen European genebanks and five bioinformatics centers are working together and have agreed on standards and protocols for data flow and data formats for the collection, integration, and archiving of genotypic and phenotypic data[@doi:10.12688/f1000research.109080.2].
The BrAPI specification is one of the agreed standards that are detailed in the AGENT guidelines for dataflow [@doi:10.5281/zenodo.12625360]. The implemented BrAPI interface enables the analysis of current and historic genotypic and phenotypic information. This will drive the discovery of genes, traits, and knowledge for future missions, complement existing information for wheat and barley, and use the new data standards and infrastructure to promote better access and use of PGR for other crops in European genebanks. The AGENT database backend aggregates curated passport data, phenotypic data, and genotypic data on wheat and barley accessions of 18 project partners. This data is accessible via BrAPI endpoints and explorable in a web portal. Genotyping data uses the DivBrowse [@doi:10.1093/gigascience/giad025] storage engine and its BrAPI interface. Soon, the BrAPI implementation will be expanded to enable the integration of analysis pipelines in the AGENT portal, such as the FIGS+ pipeline developed by ICARDA [@doi:10.22004/AG.ECON.266624]. There is also a plan to integrate the data collected by the AGENT project into the European Search Catalogue for Plant Genetic Resources (EURISCO) [@doi:10.1093/nar/gkac852].