AFSI Newsletter - November 2024 | |
Highlighting the AFSI Crop Composition Database (CCDB) | |
The Agriculture & Food Systems Institute (AFSI) develops and maintains online tools designed to advance understanding and inform research related to nutrition and agriculture across the globe. The AFSI Crop Composition Database (CCDB) is a curated, open-access resource that provides data on the natural variability in the nutrients, anti-nutrients, secondary metabolites, and toxicants for agriculturally important food, feed, and fiber crops. This information is critical for informing comparative assessments of genetically engineered foods and feeds, as well as research to promote the healthy growth of livestock, advance overall knowledge of human nutrition, and improve global data sets related to food security and nutrition modeling. Updated in 2024 to version 10.0, the CCDB currently includes information on the following crops: apple, two canola crops, cassava, eucalyptus, field corn, sweet corn, cotton, mustard, potato, red pepper, rice, sorghum, soybean, strawberry, sugar beet, and sugarcane. | | |
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What Data Is in the CCDB? | The CCDB contains data on the composition of conventionally bred varieties of important food, feed, and fiber crops. With more than 1.5 million data points representing over 230 compositional components, the CCDB’s data was collected using harvested samples from controlled field trials originating from 17 countries, assembled across several growing seasons over 27 years (1995-2022). These robust datasets include the year, region, and country of harvested samples, providing insight into factors that drive the natural variability of compositional components and data distributions for specific analytes. | |
Regulators and product developers of new plant varieties developed through modern biotechnology frequently refer to the CCDB as part of pre-market safety evaluations, which include comparative compositional assessments. The database is also referenced in OECD consensus documents for compositional considerations of cotton, potato, rice, and soybean. Academic researchers, scientists from public-sector institutions, and students use the CCDB as a reference resource to access mean levels and ranges (minimum to maximum) of compositional components. | |
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AFSI manages the CCDB with input from independent experts with backgrounds in academia, industry, and regulatory bodies. As part of the CCDB Working Group, they advise on relevant issues related to analytical methods and data proposed for inclusion. This ensures that the database maintains quality data, provides clear data acceptance criteria for potential data providers, targets new data uploads and additional crops, and undergoes timely improvements based on stakeholder feedback. | |
Continually updating and expanding the CCDB would not be possible without the invaluable expertise and time volunteered by the members of the CCDB Working Group, whose scientific and practical advice are integral to maintaining the database as a quality source of composition data. AFSI would like to take this opportunity to thank each of the following members for their active participation and informed feedback: Dr. Véronique J. Barthet, Dr. Philip Brune, Dr. Brandon Fast, Ms. Nancy Gillikin, Mr. David Roberts, Lic. Diego Rodriguez, Dr. Aniruddha Raychaudhuri, Ms. Ann Scaife, Dr. Seonwoo Oh, and Dr. Alison J. Edwards. | | | | |
