Cropgenebank's Blog

The Second Global Plan of Action for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture was unanimously approved by the FAO Council at the end of November. See press release and text of GPA2

If you search in Google on “Crop genebank” CGKB comes up in the 1st place! That’s a nice piece of news I got today.

We are glad to announce that we have finalized and published the radish best practices that had been under development for the past several months. They are now available to all users of the CGKB in the ‘Crops’ section. It is the first crop that has been added to the crop section after the launch of the web site. We thank the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science (CAAS) for the financial support of Qiu Yang’s secondment as visiting research fellow for three months to Bioversity International, during which the main compilation work was carried out. Qiu Yang is a radish researcher at the Institute of Vegetables and Flowers at CAAS in Beijing, China. Bioversity provided the resources to coordinate the whole process of compilation, development and publication of the best practices. Would be great to see the crop section grow further in future!

Further to our post from January: The MCPD review is progressing and until 26 July you now have the opportunity to actively contribute to the review through the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VFJ2XYG

The International Training Course for Plant Genetic Resources and Genebank Management is currently taking place in Suwon, Republic of Korea for the third time from 12th June – 2nd July 2011. It is held at the National Agrodiversity Center RDA Genebank. Participants from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are getting intensive and practical training in good practices for effective ex situ conservation and sustainable utilization of genetic diversity held in genebanks.

National Agrodiversity Center RDA Genebank

The multicrop passport descriptors are a frequently referred to document in the CGKB.
They are going to be reviewed very soon. See a note from the team that is leading that process:

“The objective of the FAO/IPGRI List of Multi-crop Passport Descriptors (MCPD), developed jointly by Bioversity International (formerly IPGRI) and FAO was to provide an internationally agreed standard for the exchange of basic information on plant genetic resources conserved ex situ.

Since its publication in 2001, the MCPD list has been widely adopted by a number of crop networks, CGIAR centres, international organizations and national genebanks around the world, as well as by global and regional information sharing initiatives such as the GCP Passport Ontology, the Germinate software and EURISCO. Recently it has been adopted by USDA-GRIN and applied in the development of GENESYS.

After almost ten years, Bioversity and FAO have undertaken a revision of the MCPD list, to evaluate its current validity and eventually to accommodate emerging issues which may be of relevance (e.g. inclusion of descriptors on the International Treaty’s Multilateral System). This of course will be done by trying to preserve the MCPD original value and by taking into consideration the fact that it is currently widely applied and that any radical change might result in adverse effects on the standardization attempts.

We are currently having consultations with some experts on the proposed list of modifications and plan to run a user survey involving National Programmes, CGIAR centres, USDA, and the International Treaty in February, 2011. We would most welcome valuable advice from partners.

Adriana Alercia
Michael Mackay
Stefano Diulgheroff”

The new learning module on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, recently launched by Bioversity,available, has been added to the training modules in CGKB learning resources section

Hi there, greetings for the new year 2011!

We concluded 2010 with the online launch of the CGKB on the SGRP web site! Here you can find the launch announcement: http://www.sgrp.cgiar.org/?q=node/1074/.

Other achievements in the last months of 2010:
In September we managed to finalize the cassava pages and could remove the password from the cassava section.
Pages on genetic stocks, non plant taxa (rhizobia, microbes) and neglected and underutilized species have been included under the menu item “specialized collections” in the management strategies section.

2011: The number of pages available in Spanish will continue to grow. We continue to update the pages, to add new content, and to look forward to suggestions and content that our users may provide for upload to and sharing through the web site.