Category: Genebanks

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An appreciation of Mark Bohning

More bad news, I’m afraid, this time from the USDA’s National Plant Germplasm System. Gary Kinard, Research Leader at the National Germplasm Resources Laboratory in Beltsville has informed us of the passing of Mark Bohning. I first met Mark quite some time ago, and interacted with him on a number of occasions over the years. He was very knowledgeable about the US germplasm system, its genebanks, documentation system and users, and always incredibly helpful in dealing with enquiries. This is very sad news for everyone working in plant genetic resources. Below is the announcement Gary sent round a couple of days ago.

I am enormously saddened to share the news with you that Mark Bohning, a Plant Germplasm Program Specialist with the USDA-ARS National Germplasm Resources Laboratory in Beltsville died this morning at St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore from multiple organ failure. Mark had been having some ongoing medical problems for awhile, although his sudden passing at age 53 is tragic and shocking to his many friends and colleagues.

Mark was a Plant Germplasm Program Specialist with NGRL where he worked on a variety of projects to support the US National Plant Germplasm System. He was the primary liaison between ARS and our 42 Crop Germplasm Committees (CGC) and travelled to many CGC meetings over the years. He participated in the apple CGC teleconference on Friday May 3. I think it is somehow appropriate this was his last CGC meeting as it was one his favorite committees with which to interact. He also helped assign Plant Introduction numbers for the NPGS and was always willing to help sites load data into GRIN (Germplasm Resources Information Network), generate reports for ARS, and generally help users understand the system. He would toil quietly and without complaint to help enter many germplasm requests that were received as emails into GRIN. I could always count on Mark for his wealth of knowledge and willingness to help out in any way he could, without fanfare or need for recognition.

Few ARS employees knew the history, and had breadth of knowledge, of the NPGS and GRIN as well as Mark; he literally grew up with the system. He began working for ARS in 1980 while he was still an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Horticulture from the University of Maryland in 1982 and 1985, respectively. He spent his entire career at BARC, almost all of it in NGRL.

Mark knew so many people associated with our genetic resource collections- from the curators and genebank staff, to stakeholders and colleagues in other USDA agencies, to the CGC Chairs, to a great many of the public and private sector members of the 42 CGCs.

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Nibbles: Trees, Gates on CG, Gardens, NUS surveys, GMOs, Free range livestock, Tasty fish, Traditional potatoes

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Brainfood: Carrot domestication, Nigerian diets, Rotations & ecosystem services, Bangladeshi diets, Maize breeding sites, Olives and climate change, Mixtures and invertebrates, Genebank information systems

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Nibbles: GMO promises promises, African livestock outside & in, Vegetables galore, Farmer videos from US & Sri Lanka, Fermentation beery & otherwise, Yam people & traits, Botanic garden diversity, ECPGR, CWR in US & Benin, Herbarium data, Baobab info, Olean info, Pix, Indian cooking

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Wheat diversity collections seen and unseen

A couple of things on wheat today, thanks to Tom Payne at CIMMYT, our go-to guy for all things triticaceous. First, Kew’s new page on Bread Wheat, which has a lot of useful information, including this:

About 250,000 samples of bread wheat are held in agricultural gene banks around the world, so the plant is far from being threatened. However, there is cause for concern in terms of bread wheat landraces, which are being replaced by modern cultivars and under threat of extinction if not already conserved in ex-situ collections.

The figure is I suspect from Genesys, from which the map below is taken. WIEWS, which covers many more genebanks, gives 546,797, but there’s probably much more duplication in that number than in the Genesys one.

GenesysMap

And second, from the just published study “Agricultural Innovation: The United States in a Changing Global Reality,” a wide-ranging analysis of the benefits to the US of investment in international agricultural research, a discussion of the pedigree of the hard red winter wheat variety Jagger, the most widely planted wheat variety in the United States:

The breeders who developed Jagger drew on genetic material from all over the world and throughout the United States. Jagger was formed by crossing the breeding line KS82W418 (developed by the Kansas agricultural experimental station) with the variety Stephens (developed jointly by the Oregon agricultural experiment station and USDA-ARS). In turn, these two varieties stand firmly on the shoulders of the investments in scientific crop breeding over the past century and the eons of selection and seed-saving efforts of farmers since wheat was first domesticated around 10,000 years ago. Jagger’s ancestry includes varieties like Turkey Red from Russia, Noe from France, Federation and Purplestraw from Australia, Yaqui from Mexico, and Etawah from India.

Too bad that the closest the authors come to saying where those ancestors of Jagger, along with their 250,000 or 500,000 or whatever cousins, may be found, despite numerous references in the text to CIMMYT and USDA, is this laconic sentence:

In addition to the efforts of private citizens, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) sent its scientists to the far corners of the globe in search of better plant varieties.

Maybe I’ll send them that Kew link.