One intuitively may assume that a close, coordinated connection exists between effective crop conservation and breeding. Frequently this assumption couldn't be further from the truth. Why? There are occasionally divergent goals, different priorities, and constrained resources that impact upon the connection between curators / conservationists and breeders. Much curatorial work over the past decades has been descriptive and/ or retrospective in nature. If the linkage between conservation and breeding is to be improved, curatorial efforts must become more predictive, for example, hypothesizing where new sources of crop diversity can be found. Moreover, over the past decade, curators have become fixated on quantifying and partitioning neutral diversity as determined by the use of anonymous molecular makers. Though this strategy has yielded benefits for conservation through an improved understanding of genetic representation, it hasn't been effective at building the bridge between conservation and utilization. Based on the great progress in crop genomics, curators now have the ability to move from a focus on neutral diversity to a more 'functional' representation of materials they hold in their collections.

English

0309|AGRIS 0301|AL-Maize Program

Juan Carlos Mendieta

CIMMYT Publications Collection