Agricultural gene banks hope soon to cease serving primarily as warehouses for plant seeds and start capitalizing on the often hidden value of some 7 million seed deposits held in more than 1700 repositories around the world.
A nascent initiative, dubbed DivSeek, aims to systematically characterize the genetic, physical, and biochemical makeup of banked seeds in hopes of exploiting traits—such as drought tolerance and pest resistance—that could help produce better crop varieties. The 69-member DivSeek consortium, which includes the world’s leading agricultural research centers, publicly unveiled the effort in San Diego, California, in advance of the annual International Plant & Animal Genome conference.
“DivSeek is an idea whose time has come,” says Peter Wenzl, who will serve as the DivSeek liaison from the Global Crop Diversity Trust in Bonn, Germany. It can take up to a decade to transform raw germplasm into new crop varieties, he notes, and developing better ways to characterize banked seeds and share information about them could help accelerate the process.
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Gene banks have long been viewed as important players in helping address food security. But developing a global framework for studying and sharing this genetic wealth has been a long-standing challenge, marked by perennial funding problems and, prior to the adoption of an international agreement, sometimes fierce debates over who owns and should benefit from banked seeds. Perhaps the biggest hurdle has been galvanizing the will and technical ability to coordinate and fund data sharing, says Hannes Dempewolf, a scientist at the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
Read full, original article: ‘DivSeek’ aims to mine the genetic treasure in seed bank vaults
