Germplasm Acquisition

A total of Ninety- six (96) accessions of nineteen crop species were collected from the germplasm exploration and collection mission into the North-West, North-Central and South-Western geo-political zones of Nigeria in December, 2012. The materials were collected from the farmers’ field, farmers store and food markets across the zones and conserved in the Gene banks appropriately. Details of the collection are contained in Table 1.

Table 1: Germplasm collected during the exploration trips

Similarly, as part of the requirement of the collaborative project between NACGRAB and Global Crop Diversity Trust, safety duplicates of the materials collected by the participating National Agricultural Institutes (i.e. IAR, Zaria and Lake Chad Research Institute) were sent to Svalbard Global Seed Vault and ICRISAT Sahelian Centre, Niamey for safe keeping.

Table 2: Germplasm sent for safe keeping at International Gene banks

Donations

In order to increase the accessions conserved at the NACGRAB Gene bank, the under listed members of staff of NACGRAB donated 39 accessions of 8 crop species to the Centre. The germplasm had been conserved appropriately.

Table3: Germplasm donated By NACGRAB staff

Safety Duplicate:

NACGRAB as the focal point for genetic resources conservation and use in Nigeria serve as repositories of germplasm of National Agricultural Research Institutes (NARIs) in form of safety duplicate. Five varieties of Hybrid maize and Kenaf released in 2012 by the Institute of Agricultural Research and Training (IAR&T) were deposited into the National Gene bank as safety duplicate and conserved appropriately (Table 3).

Table 4. Safety duplicates of registered and released crop varieties kept in the NACGRAB gene bank in 2012