There’s a great blog post up on the ICRISAT website from its new Director General, Dr David Bergvinson. It basically says, though not in so many words, that the centre’s germplasm collections are the foundation of all its crop improvement work. Which is nicely illustrated by this diagram (click to embiggen), from Dr Shivali Sharma, who’s a senior scientist in the genebank. You can see more photos of her (and others’) wide crossing and pre-breeding work at ICRISAT on the Flickr album I put together after my visit there a couple of years back.
Dr Bergvinson closes his post by pointing to ICRISAT’s 100 Voices video series, the first instalment of which is on genomics as a tool to make even better use of genebank collections.