A Taste of Wellness for Savoury and Snacks
Givaudan
The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in the United States and Bioversity International are partnering with the Global Crop Diversity Trust to develop the extensive database for the world's plant genebanks, which is intended to be easy and quick to use.
Genetic and agricultural research continues and advances worldwide, generating more information about the wide range of plants preserved in global genebanks, which is increasingly hard to manage and confusing to access.
Genebanks are facilities for maintaining crop diversity. They contain genetic material (seeds or DNA) collected from species found in the wild or collected from domesticated, cultivated species, which are important in terms of their genetic diversity.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN, there are about 1,400 collections, ranging in size from a single sample to the US collection with 464,000 different samples.
With improved access to such information, researchers may be able to find solutions to problems facing the cultivation of crops, such as disease resistance, productivity and changes occurring due to climate change.
There were crop shortages in 2007 that are continuing now. These have impacted on the cost of raw materials, affecting in turn product prices and company profits. Genetic information could be the answer to overcoming such shortages.
The nucleus of the system will be ARS's existing Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN), a database that already houses information about the more than 480,000 accessions (distinct varieties of plants) in ARS's National Plant Germplasm System.
Now, software upgrades will enable the GRIN system to be used by genebanks of all sizes, making more information about more plants available to researchers. The new system will help genebanks conserve and use precious genetic resources more effectively, allowing for solutions to be found more easily.
For example, ARS recently screened a key part of the US wheat and barley collection to find genes that provide resistance to a new rust fungus, Ug99, which was considered able to threaten 80 per cent of the world's wheat. Ug99 first appeared in Uganda in 1999, and has since been found in Kenya and Ethiopia.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust will contribute $1.4m (€964,156) to support this three-year project. ARS will contribute more than $900,000 (€619,814).
ARS is the US Department of Agriculture's chief scientific research agency. The Global Crop Diversity Trust is an independent international organisation whose mission is to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide.
Bioversity International is an international research organisation dedicated solely to the conservation and use of agricultural biodiversity.