By christelle.rabil@croptrust.org
January 19, 2026

What was Genesys up to last year?

As of December 2025, Genesys held passport information on 4,464,904 active accessions in international, regional, and national genebanks. In addition to passport data on accessions, genebanks use Genesys to share images, information on collection subsets, and trait data with associated crop trait descriptors.

Figure: Genesys data providers in 2025.

Increasing the number of data providers

In 2025, three new genebanks signed the Genesys Data Provider Agreement and uploaded data to Genesys: SVIC (Armenia), INIA (Uruguay), INIAP (Peru).

The support of the BOLD project to national genebanks includes publishing data in Genesys. We completed the on-boarding of BOLD partners Peru, Morocco, and Cuba in 2025 and added more data from Egypt, Lebanon, Azerbaijan in addition to adding passport data from other genebanks as part of their Svalbard safety duplication activities.

Figure: Percentage of passport data of BOLD WP1 partners uploaded to Genesys.

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 2025. To date, the Genesys team uploaded data on over 33,000 accessions conserved at 36 partner genebanks from 29 countries. 

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.

Data publishing

By December 2025, 92.5% of 4.4+ million active accessions were updated. Most of these updates were from EURISCO, CGIAR, Embrapa and USDA. Genesys considers an accession to be up-to-date if the passport data has been refreshed at least once in the last 24 months.

In addition to passport data, 31 subsets were added from international genebanks (including CGIAR centers and WorldVeg). These cover a wide range of valuable traits, such as abiotic stress resistance from ICRISAT, CIP, and CIAT; core collections from WorldVeg and ILRI; and iron and vitamin traits from AfricaRice, among others, all of which can be explored here. In parallel, 11 data providers contributed 39 trait datasets, originating not only from international genebanks but also from national partners, including Ghana, Azerbaijan, and Mali.

Capacity Building

The Crop Trust organized a number of online and in-person training events to support data providers and encourage them to publish more data:

• Three webinars on Genesys data upload were delivered to genebanks on June 23 for the ECPGR working groups on Capsicum and Eggplants, on June 26 for coffee genebanks, and  on November 11 to the International Coconut Community.

• Two public webinars on how to use Genesys were held, attracting over 200 participants. The sessions showcased the latest tools, including Genesys AI and the Subsetting Tool. Recordings are available on the Crop Trust YouTube channel.

• Two data management workshops were organized by the Crop Trust, one in June in Johannesburg and another in October in Rabat. Each included two full-day training sessions on Genesys tools and together brought 64 professionals from over 40 national and international genebanks.

• The Community of Practice on data management, organized by the Crop Trust, continued to meet monthly in English, Spanish, and French. In 2025, a total of 108 sessions were held, bringing together genebank data managers to learn about the latest data management tools and to exchange experiences and best practices.

Embedded Genesys

In 2025, CIMMYT, CIP, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Azerbaijan, and IRRI started using Embedded Genesys, joining NACGRAB, IITA, ILRI, WorldVeg, AfricaRice, Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, and ICBA. Maintenance and development of Embedded Genesys continued and the latest version is 1.7.3.

That’s only a selection of what Genesys was up to in 2025! Stay tuned for our full 2025 report and 2026 plans.