What better way to start the new year than with an attractive catalog of banana accessions from USDA? Especially as, coincidentally, the Musa Germplasm Information System also debuts a new iteration of the website. This from a Facebook post today:
It is now possible to order ITC accessions from MGIS, an online database on genebank accessions of wild and cultivated bananas. The latest release also added information on 1,288 accessions for a total of 3,630 accessions maintained in 11 field and in vitro collections.
That Mai’a Maoli Eka cultivar in the photo from the USDA catalog of course features in MGIS, so you can order it if you like the look of it…
Ah no, wait. According to GRIN, it’s not available. Bummer.
Hi Luigi,
Regarding the USDA catalog we had the opportunity to see it last year before the official release and we were involved in the review of the content. And yes it is a beautiful catalog and it is a pity that Brian Irish left TARS, we will miss him.
About the ordering of material from MGIS web site let me clarify something. From MGIS web site it is possible to order, ONLY, germplasm from ITC collection. We are not providing ordering system for other participating collections. Nevertheless it is still possible to contact the collections from MGIS web site.
The availability of ITC material is only visible once you are logged into MGIS. If logged, then, for ITC accessions available for distribution, a tiny basket appears on top right corner of the passport data. I agree it is not perfect and we will continue to improve the friendliness of the web site in the next iterations, in addition of new features in preparation such as cross reference.
From now you can look at the Taxonomy browser to navigate throughout the 3630 accessions recorded in MGIS. And yes the taxonomy browser is showing strange or erroneous information about classification but we think that this will help our partners and us to cure the data and improve the quality of MGIS. A new feature introduced is the accession comparator (to use it you need to be logged in) which help to compare Data between accessions held in different collections. Again it will highlight discrepancy and again we think that it will help us to improve the data quality.
Thank you for your post mentioning the new iteration of MGIS web site.
And by the way happy and healthy New Year 2016 to you, your family, your colleagues and all the readers of your blog.
Max
Thanks, Max. Happy new year to you too. I assume you’re also working on sharing the MGIS data with Genesys? At the moment only the USDA collection seems to turn up.
You are welcome.
I need to update first the ITC collection and then the partners Data, it is parts of my duty regarding Genesys. But before to do so we need to work out the Data to ensure the quality. We performed last year an analysis of few collections, using PDCI. We plan to include this feature in a new release of MGIS, once done in partnership with Data Provider the Data will flow into Genesys.