Curator checks growth of a meristem tissue
culture. Click the image for more information about it.
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Beautiful
Flowers--It's All in Their Genes
By Don Comis
August 11, 2004 As you visualize the orange and
yellow mums--and maybe the purple asters--in your soon-to-be fall flower
garden, consider what would happen if the genes for these flowers disappeared.
To make sure this doesn't happen, Agricultural Research Service scientists
and cooperators are helping to preserve these genes as the genetic diversity of
many popular flowers continues to shrink. Breeders often focus on beauty at the
expense of other traits, while development threatens natural habitats. Both of
these factors lead to a narrower gene pool.
ARS, Ohio State University and
the American floriculture industry have created the
Ornamental Plant Germplasm Center in
Columbus, Ohio, to preserve flower genes for this rapidly growing sector of
U.S. agriculture.
Center director David Tay and colleagues are preserving flower
genes--contained in seeds, bulbs, cuttings and plant tissue--in seed coolers,
greenhouses and fields. The ARS National Center for Genetic Resources
Preservation in Fort Collins, Colo., keeps duplicates in highly secure
storage.
Just three years old, the Ohio center is the newest addition to the U.S.
National Plant Germplasm System, which began in 1946 and now includes 26
genebanks across the country.
With its modern, 6,000-square-foot office-laboratory complex and an
11,500-square-foot greenhouse complex, the Columbus center is one of the few
flower genebanks in the world. This year, the center added a tissue culture lab
for housing tissues of daylilies, geraniums and other vegetatively propagated
flowers. The center maintains a total collection of more than 2,000 plant
accessions from around the world. It recently acquired an X-ray machine to
screen out empty seeds and check for damage from cleaning.
The floriculture industry is vital to the economies of many states, like
Ohio. Nationally, floriculture is a $13-billion-a-year industry, while globally
it's worth about $50 billion.
Read
more about the flower genebank in the current issue of Agricultural
Research magazine.
ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief scientific research agency.
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