New data from national genebanks
5 July 2024
Here are the updates made in the first half of 2024.
More than 1,200,000 accession records have been refreshed and an additional 46,964 accessions have been added to Genesys in the period between January 1st and July 1st 2024, .
The additions come from 27 national genebanks located in 20 different countries as shown in the map below.
Around half of these new accessions come from the USDA genebanks of the National Plant Germplasm System. The diversity of these accessions is noteworthy, as they represent over 2,300 different species of crop wild relatives, improved cultivars and genetic stocks. Explore USDA’s new accessions here.
Partners of the BOLD project have contributed to the second-highest number of new accessions during this time period.
The project is helping 42 partners around the world to regenerate seed and to back them up both at another genebank and at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for long-term safekeeping.Genesys displays data from these partners' 2023 and 2024 deposits to Svalbard. Please note that some of these partners also share passport data with Genesys that extends beyond the scope of the project, such as Mali, Armenia and Albania.
The dedicated page for these genebanks provides easier access to this data.
Here is a sneak peek of the data of three new genebanks that now have data in Genesys:
The BOLD project is working with another 15 national genebanks in Africa, Asia and Latin America to strengthen their capacity to manage, document, conserve and back up the crop diversity that they hold. by upgrading their IT infrastructure, adoption of GGCE for internal data management, and making data available in Genesys. Lebanon and Laos uploaded passport data to Genesys during this first half of the year. Make sure to check out the page dedicated to this group.
Lebanon published over 1,400 accessions of crop wild relatives collected jointly with the Millenium Seed Bank between 1996 and 2010, and repatriated to the country in 2013. Laos published 735 rice accessions, all of which are traditional cultivars originating from the country.
Characterization and evaluation datasets
During this period our partners have added 25 trait datasets in a searchable format. CIP added data on level of ploidy and chromosomal number of different potato species, while IITA, ILRI, ICARDA, and ICRAF published agromorphological characterization datasets.
National genebanks of Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria uploaded characterization data on sorghum, finger millet, rice, eggplant and maize.
The World Vegetable Center uploaded one dataset characterizing 5,270 accessions of chillies across 88 traits, and one evaluation dataset against different viruses.