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Providing secure,
long-term storage for critical maize and wheat genetic
resources; facilitating their use to solve practical
breeding problems; improving knowledge about genetic
diversity; developing and assessing complementary strategies
for in situ and ex situ conservation;
exploring genetic diversity at the molecular level;
helping develop global databases on maize and wheat
genetic resources.
The Facility
 In
September 1996 CIMMYT inaugurated the Wellhausen-Anderson
Plant Genetic Resources Center, built to replace our
outdated 20-year-old germplasm bank and seed distribution
facilities. Funded in part by the Japanese Government,
the state-of-the-art Center has a storage capacity of
450,000 seed samples and specially designed seed treatment
and packaging installations to support CIMMYT’s
unique, global role in germplasm conservation and distribution.
The Center is fittingly named in honor of two  visionaries
who were well ahead of their time in recognizing and
applying the power of crop genetic resources. As a staff
member of a Rockefeller Foundation-Mexico collaborative
breeding program in the 1940-50s, Edwin J. Wellhausen
(pictured at right; Wellhausen is on the right)
coordinated and took part in the systematic collection
and preservation of native Mesoamerican maize germplasm
against the day of its possible replacement or extinction.
He later served as CIMMYT’s first director general.
Glenn Anderson (pictured at left), who died in
1981, is fondly remembered by many CIMMYT staff and
researchers worldwide as a talented wheat scientist,
teacher, and research administrator, but especially
as an inspiring leader who helped spark the Green Revolution
that changed the world and demonstrated dramatically
the potential of crop genetic resources.
CIMMYT Involvement in the Global
Plan of Action for Genetic Resources
The Global Plan of Action
(GPA) for plant genetic resources for food and agriculture
aims to promote the conservation, sustainable utilization,
and fair and equitable sharing of benefits of plant
genetic resources. It is designed to contribute to the
implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity
in the field of food and agriculture.
The GPA foresees a continuing
role for the CGIAR as a major component in the global
system for the conservation and improvement of plant
genetic resources for food and agriculture. It recognizes
the collections the Centers have amassed and hold in
trust within the International Network of Ex-situ
Collections, as well as their efforts on germplasm enhancement,
breeding, and distribution, including their involvement
in crop networks. The GPA also recognizes the CGIAR’s
continuing scientific and technical contribution to
the development of policies and strategies, methodologies,
and technologies for genetic resource conservation and
utilization. Moreover, the GPA calls for institution
and capacity building at all levels, and thus indirectly
recognizes the CGIAR’s continuing work in training
and public awareness, support to national programs and
networks, and its provision of advice and information.
In order to support the implementation
of the GPA, CIMMYT plans to:
• fully support the System-wide
Genetic Resources Program and other CGIAR initiatives
that facilitate the System’s role in the GPA and
related matters;
• enhance its information systems
on mandate species’ genepools so as to further
facilitate access;
• strengthen research on in-situ
conservation and farmer-participatory methods, particularly
with maize (this will entail greater emphasis on women
farmers and on linkages with NGOs and other participatory
groups);
• improve methodology on the
management of landraces in ex-situ conservation
to enhance and improve them in ways such that they become
more productive when reintroduced into farming systems;
• support initiatives aimed at
assisting farmers in disaster situations to restore
agricultural systems in which maize, wheat, or triticale
are important crops;
• ensure that the collections
kept in trust are managed and safeguarded to the highest
standards in terms of duplication, regeneration, storage,
and other key functions; and
• initiate, implement, and/or
support "gap-filling" collection efforts related
to mandate species in a carefully targeted manner.
Preserving and Distributing Maize
and Wheat Seed Collections
The Plant Genetic Resource Center’s
specially designed vaults currently hold some 22,000
samples of maize and teosinte, a wild relative of maize,
and 168,000 Triticeae samples, including bread wheat,
durum wheat, and triticale (a man-made crop developed
by crossing wheat with rye), with significant collections
of barley, rye, and primitive and wild relatives of
wheat. The Center also maintains a living collection
of Tripsacum, a more distant maize relative.
Active collections in our bank —
those from which seed is drawn for CIMMYT’s work
and to meet hundreds of requests yearly from researchers
worldwide — are maintained at -3oC,
ensuring seed viability for 25 to 40 years. Base collections
are kept at -18oC, maintaining germination
for more than 50 years. Germination capacity is carefully
monitored and, when necessary, seed is grown out following
internationally accepted methods to provide fresh samples
that embody the genetic diversity of the original.
As part of an agreement between FAO
and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR), to which CIMMYT belongs, most of our
seed collections are held "in trust" —
that is, under long-term storage for the benefit of
humanity and free from any intellectual property restrictions.
 CIMMYT
promotes unrestricted access to maize and wheat genetic
resources and related information, so as to benefit
as many farmers in the developing world as possible.
We honor all requests from researchers for samples of
seed, giving preference to our developing country partners
when seed supplies are limited. Shipments are accompanied
by proper phytosanitary documentation and a letter stipulating
the recipient’s tacit agreement not to seek protection
for the seed as intellectual property. The Plant Genetic
Resources Center houses CIMMYT’s international
testing units, which distribute experimental maize and
wheat varieties and relevant information to hundreds
of partners in developing countries for use in their
breeding programs.
Utilization at CIMMYT
The key to CIMMYT’s success in
producing improved maize and wheat for a hungry world
has been our unique ability to bring together genetic
materials from all over the globe and combine them in
creative ways. Landraces and other types of germplasm
bank collections have been used time and again to improve
maize and wheat cultivars, providing such productive
traits as a shorter, stouter plant architecture, stress
tolerance, and disease resistance, among others. From
wild relatives, CIMMYT has bred a large set of wheat
plants with resistance to many pathogens and tolerance
to constraints such as saline soils. By crossing durum
wheat with a range of wild grasses (the type of cross
which spawned the first hexaploid bread wheat thousands
of years ago), CIMMYT researchers have created "synthetic"
bread wheats that provide a natural bridge for transferring
useful traits, especially stress tolerances, from the
grasses to cultivated wheat. Scientists from the French
National Research Institute for Development through
Cooperation (ORSTOM) working at CIMMYT are using progeny
of maize x Tripsacum hybrids to obtain a maize
plant that reproduces through apomixis, an asexual type
of replication that would allow maize farmers to replant
their own seed cycle after cycle without sacrificing
yield. Tripsacum and teosinte are being used
as sources of resistance to the parasitic flowering
plant Striga, a widespread and intractable pest
of maize in sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, we are applying
molecular markers to improve our effectiveness in handling
specific traits such as tolerance in wheat to aluminum-toxic
soils (a condition that limits yields on vast tracts
of wheat land in South America).
In situ Conservation, Characterizing
Diversity
Our staff are working with farmer
groups and the national research system of Mexico, several
non-government organizations, ORSTOM, and specialists
in a McKnight Foundation-funded project in the state
of Puebla, with funding from Mexico and the International
Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, to support
the management and utilization of maize genetic resources
in their center of origin and to improve maize productivity
in the fields of poor farmers. In wheat, our ongoing
studies are clarifying how international agricultural
research has affected genetic diversity in the past
and how it can enhance that diversity in the future.
Results to date show that all major wheat producing
regions have contributed to bread wheat varieties in
the developing world and that the average number of
different landraces in the genetic background
of improved bread wheats has increased over time.
Facilitating
Access to Collections
Given the daunting magnitude
of our germplasm stores, a central challenge is "making
sense of the seed" — in effect, characterizing,
classifying, and (occasionally) improving collections, and
then delivering this diversity to the greatest number of users.
In maize, we have drawn on extensive field test data and information
on site of origin to form breeder-targeted core subsets of
collections for major race complexes, such as Tuxpeño. The
subsets constitute a fraction of the original collection,
yet contain nearly all its genetic diversity, greatly facilitating
searches within seed stocks and management of active collections.
In wheat, specially selected subsets have been used to locate
new resistance to Russian Wheat Aphid, an increasingly insidious
pest of the crop in some parts of the world.
Information: The Key to Our Seed
Collections
A crucial ingredient in the pro-active management
of crop genetic resources is information that allows potential
users to pinpoint seed of interest. In wheat, for example,
the same variety may have different names around the world
or, conversely, different varieties sometimes share a single
name. To remove any resulting confusion and ensure access
to multidisciplinary data on a genotype released under several
names, CIMMYT1 developed
the International Wheat Information System (IWIS),
a relational database on compact disc which assigns each genotype
a unique, genealogy-based identifier and provides extensive
pedigree and performance data. A complementary database designed
by our staff and personnel of the Australian Winter Cereals
Collection and which comes on diskette for personal computer,
the Genetic Resources Information Package (GRIP), allows IWIS
users to locate seed samples in wheat germplasm stocks around
the world and provides an abbreviated version of the IWIS
pedigrees. Finally, IWIS has given rise to a collaborative
project between CIMMYT and several other CGIAR centers to
develop an International Crop Information System (ICIS), a
data management structure based on the IWIS model and designed
to add significant value to the genetic resources of several
crops. For maize, CIMMYT has collaborated with the Latin American
Maize Evaluation Project (LAMP) to generate a compact disc
database system containing information on the site of origin,
ecological adaptation, and other relevant traits of some 12,000
seed samples. We are adding digitally scanned images of ears
and seed that should greatly enhance the utility of this electronic
germplasm catalogue.
1 With
support from Australia (GRDC), Canada (CIDA, Agriculture
and Agri-Food Canada), Denmark (DANIDA), The Netherlands
(The Ministry of Development Cooperation), and the USA
(USDA).
Collaboration
The CIMMYT Plant Genetic Resources
Center works closely with national germplasm banks and
genetic resource initiatives in developing countries,
providing backup support for national collections and
technical assistance in their preservation, sharing
seed and related information, and helping to characterize
and monitor maize and wheat diversity. For example,
during 1991-1996 CIMMYT, USAID, and the USDA National
Seed Storage Laboratory (NSSL) helped germplasm banks
of 14 countries in Latin America to rescue and renew
nearly 7,000 endangered collections of maize landraces,
many of them irreplaceable. We participate in the CGIAR
System-wide Genetic Resources Programme (SGRP), led
by the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute
(IPGRI) and focusing on ex situ and in situ
conservation and related research, policy and socioeconomic
issues in genetic resources conservation and use, information,
and institution building.
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