Amman, Jordan:
On 30 and 31 January 2010 took place the Regional workshop on genebank management and documentation in the Near East and North Africa, in Amman, Jordan. This was now the second opportunity after the workshop in Korea last September to present the knowledge base to a group of about 15 participants from more than 10 countries. This workshop was the first activity within a recently created regional PGR network and participants were heads of genebanks, responsibles for PGR work in their country, researchers. They were very glad to learn about this website and here below are some written comments they provided, after having navigated the site on their own for some time.
- Most important part: procedures, even small details are explained, very clear, every step is clarified. Web site will be a great reference for me to strengthen my knowledge about genebank management.
- Very useful in general. In particular the practices for regeneration that we miss in our genebank in NCARE (National Research Center for Agricultural Research and Extension, Amman, Jordan)
- Technical information is sufficient for any genebank to start working on scientific basis
Among the crops mentioned that would be important for that region to be included in the CGKB, are cotton, sorghum, cowpea, stone fruit trees, grapes, olive, citrus, vegetables (tomato, Vigna, Phaseolus, faba beans, snake cucumber).
They were very glad to discover that we have regeneration guidelines in Arabic, and some of them indeed commented that translations would be very useful.
Qatar:
Ahmed Amri from ICARDA is participating in a national training course on genebank management these days (1-4 February) in Qatar and will present the knowledge base to participants. I gave him the sheets I used to gather written feedback to do so also this week in Qatar. Let’s see what feedback he will provide
Imke
Science Report » Blog Archive » Nibbles: Amman again, DNA hype, Blight-resistant spuds, Seeds, Sorghum, Brassicas, UK Food Security said
[...] Crop Genebank’s Knowledge Base enjoys an outing in Amman. [...]
Alexandra Jorge said
Hi Imke,
Welcome to the blogging team! Great start and great news about the Knowledge Base. Well done!
I am sure the word is spreading and that all the work out there starts to bear fruits and be usefull for many.
Alexandra
ehsan Dulloo said
Thanks Imke for this feed back on Amman workshop. It is satisfying to read about the comments from the participants. Translation to a new langauge is an important point. But we would need to find the resources to do that.
Ehsan
Alexandra Jorge said
I met Amri last month in Rome, just after the training course he had in Qatar. He told me they had 23 participants from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry and from the Biotechnology Center of the University. They are interested in creating a new genebank and want to learn more about it. The training provided general principles and guidelines on how to start a genebank. They have so far 275 species, many of them Alfalfa sp. They found the website very useful for this sort of training with many useful links to explore and use.