The VIR Department of Biotechnology, Pushkin

Tatjana Gavrilenko and her potato collection

Tatjana Gavrilenko and the slow growth chamber

The VIR Department of Biotechnology, Pushkin, a set on Flickr.

You may remember a post a few months back at Vaviblog describing a paper on the Vavilov’s Institute’s potato collection. I recently had the pleasure of meeting one of the authors, Dr Tatjana Gavrilenko, for the first time, and in her natural habitat to boot. Here are the results.

Fresh Nibbles

In the UK, Herefordshire’s Museum of Cider is picking up national recognition for its genebank of heritage apple trees. The BBC’s canonical autumnal apple story comes a little early this year.
Speaking of iconic apples, Kazakhstan is scaling up efforts to bring back the Aport, the giant heirloom that once made Almaty famous. No word of museums, though. Or cider.
Over in the Philippines, Department of Environment and Natural Resources is beefing up its rattan genebank to keep pace with demand, with forest stewards in Bukidnon planting seedlings to match. Furniture makers need genebanks as much as cider makers.
Sri Lanka’s pre-Green Revolution heirloom rice varieties, purana haal, are being eyed for their resilience and disease-management potential. Good thing they’re in the national genebank.
Saudi Arabia’s Jazan terraced coffee farms are turning into rural and ecotourism hotspots, proving not all agrobiodiversity needs to be in a genebank to survive. But it helps.

Published on August 9, 2026

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