Soomro Lab · Brandon Research and Development Centre · Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Breeding programs are rarely limited by biology. They are limited by the distance between the data they collect and the decisions they make.
We shorten that distance. We are the bioinformatics group at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Brandon Research and Development Centre. We support breeders and research scientists with genomics and computational biology, and we build connected breeding data and analysis pipelines that do not need a bioinformatician standing beside them.
Two current examples: a genomic selection pipeline now run by the barley breeding program itself, and nanoCAS, a real-time nanopore diagnostic built for the field.
Weather is getting less predictable faster than variety development cycles can absorb, and the crops going into the ground now have to survive conditions nobody bred them for. Breeding is how agriculture adapts. Our job is to remove whatever is slowing it down.
These bottlenecks (e.g., disconnected data, unclear marker–trait relationships, analysis queued behind one person) recur across wheat, barley, oat, canola and pulses, so we build tools that work across crop types.
The lab is led by Tayab Soomro, and most of what we build is released openly.
Recent
May 2026
Poster at the Canadian Phytopathological Society annual meeting, Halifax: Breaking the cycle — innovative collaborative approaches to fusarium head blight in barley breeding, with Badea, Tucker and colleagues.
Mar 2026
nanoCAS presented at London Calling 2026: an event-driven framework for real-time detection and decision making during nanopore sequencing.
Feb 2026
BRDC Science Seminar: The Bioinfomagician — modernizing Brandon’s breeding and genomics pipelines.
Nov 2025
Five questions on PathoScan with the Center for Data Innovation.
Oct 2025
Canada Foundation for Innovation profile: building prosperity by ensuring food security.
Contact
Brandon Research and Development Centre
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
2701 Grand Valley Road, P.O. Box 1000A
Brandon, Manitoba, R7A 5Y3
Students, collaborators and breeders with a data problem: see Work with us.