International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas

Biodiversity and Integrated Gene Management - Genetic Resources Section

Genetic Resources Section (GRS) established at ICARDA in 1985, for many people its function is limited to running the genebank, and seed distribution, this is simply not true. GRS have a major contribution to the overall ICARDA's missions, and plays a global roll in a global effort to conserve plant old verities (landraces) and wild species, the building blocks for future breeding and food security. The best way to present the important GRS is through its continues activities, the following sections will provide a short description of what GRS is doing:

Collecting

Saving crops landraces and crops wild relatives before they disappear

Cultivated and modern verities, climate change, urbanization, desertification, and many other factors are accelerating the distinction of large number of landraces and wild relatives of major crops of great importance to the global food security.

In the past 40 years, ICARDA-GRS in collaboration with national programmes, CG centers, and international organizations successfully conducted more than 215 collecting missions in 37 countries.
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Ali Shehadeh and Athanasios Tsivelikas collecting at the buffer zone of a protected area in Greece, August 2013

Conserving

Storing active and base collections of drylands genetic resources on behalf of the world

The genebank contains more than 140,000 accessions of barley, wheat, food legumes (lentil, chickpea and faba bean) and feed legumes (vetch and grass pea), and other drylands species.

Each accession is divided into two sets and stored in different condition for different purposes. First batch is for long term conservation "base collection", in a -20 C^ο cold rooms, and a second batch for medium term conservation "active collection" under -4 C^ο temperature.
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The active collection cold room (-4 c^ο), one of the two cold rooms at the genebank, ICARDA's HQ, Tel Hadia, Aleppo

Duplicating

Making sure that other copies will be available in case of everything else fails

A backup copy of ICARDA's genebank of 98% of the conserved material is already sent to other reliable genebanks around the world as a standard precaution procedure to any catastrophic situation that might impose threats "e.g. natural disasters" of losing this invaluable world's heritage.

A second copy, of ICARDA's mandate crops are sent to Svalbard seed vault, the world's long term storage facility, build inside a mountain on an island half way between Norway and the North Pole.
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Svalbard Global Seed Vault, 100 million seeds and more to come, remote island in the Arctic Circle, Norway

Managing

Applying global quality standards, security procedures, and best practices to maintain the collection

Every season our genebank curators perform number of tasks to guaranty the quality and availability of seeds: viability testing, regeneration, multiplication, taxonomic identification, characterization, basic evaluation, and seed health testing.

All procedures are following global genebank standards develop by FAO in collaboration with scientists from around the world
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ICARDA fields where the genebank seasonal plantation, HQ - Tel Hadia, Aleppo.

Distributing

Providing free access to the whole collection for the whole world, for research and plant improvement

ICARDA-GRS sends out accessions to any user from any country, free of charge, upon request and signing the Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA).

ICARDA-GRS sent more than 881,000 samples since its establishment to users from more than 85 countries, for different purposes such as: research breeding, repatriation, stresses screening, etc.
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Preparation and packing of seeds for distribution, GRS labs at the HQ -Tel Hadia, Aleppo.

Researching

Developing new methods for characterization, evaluation, and mining the collection searching for useful genes

Exploring the potential of the collection for crop improvement by: phenotyping, genotyping, and developing the methodology to mine the collection for sought adaptive traits (FIGS approach), to efficiently respond to users requests.

Performing gap analysis, to fill any geographical gaps, or underrepresented species in the collection; giving the priority to areas that will have a greater impact by climate changes.
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Regeneration trials at ICARDA's research station, Beka'a Valley, Terbol , Lebanon 2013.

Documenting

Gathering all available information about drylands genetic resource and share it with the rest of the world

Documentation is in every day-to-day work and in every activity at ICARDA-GRS, it accompany the accession through its life cycle from collecting to storage and even beyond its distribution. ICARDA-GRS database is the of information to report to international bodies such as: the CGIAR Consortium, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

GRS database combined with data from other CG Centers is also published on global portals such as SINGER and Genesys to enable users to search of material of their interest and request it online
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Documentaion of genetic resources is a continues process, strating form the field collecting forms, today we do it with tablet PCs.

Promoting

Enforcing the importance of genetic resource conservation and sustainable use in local and international forums, meetings, and conferences

Raising public awareness of stakeholders and decision makers about the importance of conserving and use of genetic resources, and the related international conventions and their implications on polices and legislations to achieve that goal, and explaining the consequences of no action, on the global food security; especially with the expected increase of world's population and the threat imposed by climate change.
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Ahmed Amri advocating the importance of genetic resource for food security at bioVision conference. Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt 2004.

Training

Providing regional and in-country training to scientists involved in genetic resources conservation and use.

Few courses are organized every year on regional level or in-country to provide nationals with the needed skills for various activities such as: Best practices for ex situ conservation, documentation and information management, Policy and legislation, Use of GIS/RS tools for assessing agro-biodiversity and land use, and many other topics related to genetic resources conservation and sustainable use.
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Regional training course on genebank best practises, Karaj, Iran, June 2012.