European genebanks start to review each other
Genebanks conserve genetic resources for future generations and make this diversity available for current users. But no genebank can do this alone - they need to collaborate and rely on each other. For good collaboration, genebanks have to trust each other’s capacity and quality.
This implies that the genetic resources are safely managed - regenerated properly, dried, packed, frozen, backed-up in another genebank, tested for germination, and accessible for users: documented, published on-line and physically available under transparent conditions. In some cases quality doesn’t meet the standards of the community and has to be improved for the genebank to become a reliable partner.
In the first three months of 2019, a pilot project, involving three European plant genebanks took place. The aim was to review each other on the basis of their ‘Genebank Manual’ - a description of the genebank procedures). It proved a great success! The three genebanks involved (CGN in Wageningen, the Netherlands, COMAV in Valencia, Spain and IHAR-PIB, in Radzików, Poland) all agreed that the genebank peer reviews were a useful and cost effective approach to improving quality in genebanks.
“As a host, although I had an initial sensation that our genebank was under scrutiny, this feeling disappeared as soon as the review started because it was carried out in a friendly atmosphere and we quickly realized that we could take advantage of many of the reviewers suggestions”, said José Vicente Valcárcel from the Spanish genebank.
Theo van Hintum, who initiated the project highlighted: “Visiting the other genebanks was intriguing and thought-provoking, hosting my colleagues in Wageningen was as revealing to me as I think it was to them. Rarely did I have a chance to see, think about and discuss our work as thoroughly and at such a high level as during these reviews.”
Similarly, Wieslaw Podyma from the Polish genebank underlined the benefits of reflecting upon the procedures continuously to make them effective and useful: “Work on the preparation of the Gene Bank Manual required an additional review of all procedures and assessment of their compliance with the others. The manual was the subject of a general discussion with the evaluators to justify the reasons for the adopted procedures.”
The Spanish partner, María José Díez, concluded that “To invest a two-day period of time sharing expertise with other genebank managers opened our minds and gave us the opportunity to reconsider our purposes and objectives in a narrow and wide sense in the Spanish genetic resources framework.”
The peer reviews were organised in the framework of the AEGIS initiative of ECPGR and the GenRes Bridge project. It is expected that similar reviews will be carried out for more plant genebanks under the ECPGR umbrella. In the framework of GenRes Bridge, reviews will be organised for the community working on animal genetic resources as well.
The reports of the first pilot genebank reviews are available on the ECPGR website.
