Graph databases are designed to both store data and record relationships between data elements. I wondered if this would be useful in tracking cross-breeding projects – essentially building “family trees” of the entity being cross-bred. The data model would have nodes with the hybrid with notes on it. Relationships for PARENT_M and PARENT_F (male and female parent of the hybrid) would be used to associate nodes.

Graph databases have a concept of pathing – what nodes do we need to traverse to get from A to B – but to create a lineage for the plants, you need to know the starting point. Which is great if you want to play six degrees of separation and find a path between two known people, but not great if I just want to know what the lineage is of Tomato #198. To make pathing possible, I needed to add a common root node to all of heirloom seedstocks – PLANT0

This allows me to take any plant and find the paths from PLANT0 to it

MATCH
p=(Tomato0:TOMATO {name: 'PLANT0'})-[*]->(Tomato8:TOMATO{name: 'Tomato0000008'})
RETURN p

And visualize the genetic heritage of the hybrid.