Setting standards and best practices for genebank conservation

The conservation of crops, crop wild relatives and trees ensures the resources needed to adapt and enhance agriculture remain available for future generations. Yet not all crops are easy to conserve. Traditional conservation methods are not feasible for germplasm from clonal crops such as banana, cassava, yam and potato, which are vegetatively propagated and/or do not produce viable seeds. These crops require different approaches for conservation.

A new set of three publications available online offers updated storage procedures for clonal crops.

For these crops, dormant buds, cuttings or meristems (explants) are used to produce plants that are genetically identical to their parent. These explants are stored either in vitro for medium-term storage, or through cryopreservation (freezing in liquid nitrogen) for long-term storage.

The publications “Refinement and standardization of storage procedures for clonal crops” are a product of the System-wide Genetic Resources Programme. This programme involved the 15 centres of the CGIAR. Four centres - Bioversity International, the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), International Potato Centre (CIP) and International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) - are collectively holding the ‘in trust’ clonal crop genebank collections of Musa, cassava, potato, sweet potato, yam and Andean root and tuber crops. 

This new set of storage procedures is the result of a survey of the facilities, storage protocols and practices of these genebank collections with a view to developing quality and risk management systems to support the production and validation of multi-crop best practice guidelines.
The publications are available for download on the Crop Genebank Knowledge Base website.