Never rains but it pours, part 37. Local newspaper article on the US potato genebank.
Chinese genebank in the top 10
The Chinese Academy of Science and Chinese Academy of Engineering voted for the country’s top 10 scientific achievements of 2007, and guess what? In at number 9 is the establishment of a genebank at the Kunming Institute of Botany.
After its completion, the resource bank will include a seed bank, vitro plant germplasm resource bank, DNA bank, and microbial seed bank. It will collect and preserve 190,000 copies (strains) of 19,000 varieties of germplasm resources.
The last genebank that got such press was you know what. No, wait, here’s another! Are genebanks the new black or something?
Apples unmoved
One of the bits of news we missed while we were resting and relaxing as hard as we were: the UK’s collection of apples and other fruits is staying at Brogdale. This may strike you as no-news news. It isn’t.
Long-standing readers will remember that the UK government put management of the site out to tender, and that two of the proposals required moving the entire collection to a new site. This seemed like a slightly daft idea, at least from our perspective. So it is good to relate that the management contract was awarded to Reading University, who will be leaving the collection where it is.
The Visitor Centre and sales areas are being expanded, and it could be that the collection is now poised to play a more important role in spreading the good news about all those fruit varieties that aren’t available in little plastic bags in the supermarket.
It has been a long and complex struggle, and it is not clear what the future of the Brogdale Horticultural Trust. We’ll try and keep informed.
Raipur rice research institute demanded
Chhattisgarh has a lot of rice diversity, so deserves its own rice institute. Wait, deserves?
A mighty wind
My recent post about lighting strikes in a coconut genebank was picked up by the excellent Coconut Google Group and generated some interesting responses. In particular, there’s a comment from Charles Clement of the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil recounting how a high-velocity wind blast — an Amazonian wind storm — took out a large chunk of his peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) genebank. Ex situ conservation in field genebanks can be a risky business indeed. The solutions are clear: more replications within collections, cleverly distributed in space; safety duplication of the entire collection somewhere else entirely (in vitro or as seeds as appropriate); and complementary conservation in situ. But that all costs money. I would say that most food crop accessions maintained in field genebanks around the world are unique. Take coconut. The Coconut Genetic Resources Database records 1416 accessions from 28 genebanks in 23 countries. More than 600 of them are represented by a single accession.