Report on Agriculture & Food Systems Institute’s Crop Composition Database Version 10.1: An Open-Access Resource for High-Quality Composition Data

Abstract

Composition studies that assess similarities and differences in levels of nutrients, anti-nutrients, and secondary metabolites are an essential part of the safety assessment of new crop varieties that are used as food and feed. It is important to understand the purpose of the data and its context in the safety assessment. The Crop Composition Database (CCDB) is a publicly available resource of composition data with application in comparative compositional assessment of genetically modified crops, informing healthy diets for livestock, and improving knowledge of global datasets related to food security and overall nutrition. Version 10.1 of the CCDB provides comprehensive composition data for 18 conventionally bred food, feed, fiber, and tree crops. The CCDB contains a little over 1.5 million data points across 232 analytes collected from field trials in 19 countries over a span of 27 years. The aim of this report is to provide information on operation and features of the CCDB, improvements to the database platform, data providers, data users, and the workflow to include data into CCDB. It also elucidates the analysis of selected datasets from the CCDB to gain an insight into the factors that contribute to the variability that is observed in crop composition.