Genebank details
ICRISAT focuses on legumes and cereals, including millets, that are important for food security in the semi-arid areas of the world. The main genebank collection is at the centre’s headquarters in Hyderabad, India, and there are three regional genebanks in Kenya, Niger, and Zimbabwe. Currently, Zimbabwe and Niger genebanks are active.
More than 146,867 accessions are listed in Genesys. Over 56,500 of these are three legumes: chickpea, pigeonpea, and groundnut, and their wild relatives. Sorghum is the most common single genus, with over 48000 accessions. There are about 41,000 accessions of various millets, including more than 29,300 of pearl millet.
Traditional cultivars and landraces make up the bulk of the holdings (82%) and about 16% are breeding and research lines. About 2% are wild relatives.
ICRISAT scientists developed the idea of mini-core collections, a representative sample of about 1% of the accessions of a species, selected to help breeders to find the traits they are interested in. There are mini-core collections of all ICRISAT mandate crops. One example is the groundnut mini-core collection, which consists of only 184 accessions that include traits for resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses and for good agronomic and nutritional status.
The ICRISAT genebank has distributed more than 1.61 million samples to 150 countries. ICRISAT accessions are part of the pedigree of more than 800 improved varieties released by national partners. ICRISAT has it self released several improved varieties that make use of genebank accessions, including pearl millets rich in micronutrients.
Over 95% of the collection is safety duplicated at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as a Second level safety duplication like
- 123,013 of the collection in SGSV.
Over 90.5% of the collection is safety duplicated at multiple organizations as a First level safety duplication like
- 30,000 Sorghum and 10,000 Pearl millet in IITA, Nigeria
- 10,000 Sorghum and 10,000 Pearl millet in ICARDA, Morocco
- 19,600 Chickpea in WVC, Taiwan
- 11,950 Pigeonpea, 14,000 Groundnut, and 10,550 Small millet in USDA-ARS
