A BOLD Wrap-Up of 2024
14 December 2024
Celebrating Progress with Genesys and the BOLD Project
As 2024 comes to a close, we’re thrilled to share some incredible milestones achieved by the BOLD project partners on Genesys. This year, data on almost 40,000 accessions were added to Genesys, showcasing the great collaboration and wonderful dedication of the BOLD community.
Regeneration and Backup
Through the BOLD project’s Work Package 4 (WP4), 42 partners around the world are regenerating seeds and ensuring their long-term safekeeping by backing them up at a second genebank and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. These efforts secure the world’s crop diversity for generations to come.
On Genesys, you can explore data from these partners’ deposits to Svalbard from 2023 and 2024. Some partners, such as the ones from Mali, Benin, Armenia, and Albania, have gone above and beyond by sharing additional passport data that extends beyond the project’s scope.
To date, 29 partners from 24 countries uploaded data on over 23,000 newly registered accessions to Genesys. Can you spot your country’s flag in the growing network of WP4 contributors?
The dedicated page for these genebanks provides easier access to this data. You can also access the information about accessions conserved in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault directly on its seed portal. But for now, here is a sneak peek of this data in Genesys:
Building Stronger Genebanks Worldwide
The BOLD project is also working with 15 national genebanks across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to bolster their capacity in managing, documenting, conserving, and safety duplicating crop diversity. Under Work Package 1 (WP1), these genebanks are upgrading IT infrastructure, adopting GGCE for internal data management, and making their data available on Genesys.
In 2024, five WP1 partners from Lebanon, Laos, Egypt, Uganda, and Tanzania contributed over 13,000 new accessions to Genesys. Each genebank in WP1 is working toward the goal of uploading 100% of their passport data to Genesys. Here’s a look at their progress so far:
Some of these accessions are geo-referenced, which means they can be grouped into subsets based on abiotic climatic variables using the Subsetting Tool on Genesys, or filtered by the climate at their collecting sites. Check out how these collections look on the map of their original collecting sites:
And make sure to check out the page dedicated to this group of partners!
As we wrap up 2024, we extend our heartfelt gratitude to every genebank data focal point for their contributions to Genesys. Your efforts are pivotal in safeguarding the world’s crop diversity forever. Here’s to more BOLD achievements and milestones in 2025!