Moira J. Sheehan

Breeding Insight was founded to reduce or remove a variety of barriers-to-entry specialty crop and animal breeders encounter with new technologies. Unlike major crops and livestock, specialty species have more challenges and smaller operating budgets with which to make genetic gains.  BI was founded as a conduit to place genomics, phenomics, and data managment tools and software into the specialty breeding programs with little or no cost to the breeders budget.  

BI develops and deploys new tools, technologies, and methods with an economy of scale centered on species-agnostic technology platform.  The types of support we offer range from marker panel development, genomics, bioinformatics, phenomics, consultation, training, co-authorship, and software development. DeltaBreed is our flagship breeding data management software, provided free of charge under an Apachi 2.0 license.  In addition to DeltaBreed, BI has also produced analytic software packages that are low-code or no-code solutions that have a low barrier to entry for breeders.  Some examples of analytic tools include BIGapp and BIGr, Qploidy, AlloMate, RoeBox, NemaQuant, and BerryPortraits.

We engage in research topics that relate tomolecular breeding, polyploidy, specialty crop breeding, technology transfer, and mining big data to implement data-driven selection and breeding decision support.