Cropgenebank's Blog

Second Global Plan of Action for PGRFA

elisasamuel — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 16:39:44 +0000

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

Google search

elisasamuel — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:57:49 +0000

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.

New radish best practices available in CGKB crop section

elisasamuel — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:48:31 +0000

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!

Review of FAO/IPGRI List of Multi-crop passport descriptors (MCPD) 2

elisasamuel — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 21:03:43 +0000

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

Korea training course is on again

elisasamuel — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:57:04 +0000

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

Review of FAO/IPGRI List of Multi-crop passport descriptors (MCPD)

elisasamuel — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:16:42 +0000

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”

New learning module on ITPGRFA

elisasamuel — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 19:56:45 +0000

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

Closure of 2010

elisasamuel — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:24:33 +0000

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.

Second Genebank Training course in South Korea (July 2010)

cropgenebank — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:11:14 +0000

We did it for the second time! A lot of support was received from KOICA, Bioversity International and RDA. This time the CGKB knowledge base was mostly completed with most web pages with many sorts of information and links. It was therefore easier to navigate through while talking about subjects covered by the CGKB. This shows one of the great benefits of this site, that anywhere and at any time (as long as connection to internet is good and reliable!) information can be accessed and links explored. We have distributed some CD’s with information and files but soon these are outdated as new information is regularly uploaded into the CGKB.

It was a great experience, with a wide range of expertise amongst the participants from 8 countries. Time was just enough to browse some important genebank issues but knowledge was shared and opportunities and possibilities shown, that can be explored later in their own countries and specific conditions.

This time there was faster interaction between students and trainees, with meals spent together and a few tea breaks for chats. Although, not much interaction occurred during the practical sessions as did last year…

We have placed some pictures of the training in our flickr album.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cropgenebank/sets/72157624693399655/

Please fill free to add your pictures too so that all the participants can share them!

Hope to hear from all of you soon!

What is new and noteworthy in the Crop Genebank Knowledge Base?

cropgenebank — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 14:03:32 +0000

A lot is happening in the last few weeks and we want to share these news to keep you in the loop of the ongoing work. The site is growing all the time!

The site is getting its pages fully uploaded. The 9^th crop, cassava is going to be uploaded soon!

New pages are being prepared to include some more relevant additional results of the GPG2 project (the project that provided the initial funds to establish this site). They will be placed under the ‘management procedures’ and will disseminate strategy documents about genetic resource collections of:

Genetic stocks
Non-plant taxa (microbial, fungal, insect and nematode)
Neglected and underutilized species

And the great news about the site expanding plans is that we have just started translating the crop pages into Spanish! This is the first (and hopefully not the last!) extra language we are introducing. They will become public very soon. The first one will be maize!

Please let us know if you would like to participate translating it into your native language in your country!

This site belongs to all of us that work within and across genebanks, so help us to improve it and making it better! Send us your comments and suggestions!