Curator and CGC Interactions:

1. Curator and CGC Interactions: A Curator’s Perspective Gary Pederson USDA, ARS, PGRCU Griffin, GA

2. CGC experience • Clover plant breeder – 18 years • Early user of GRIN and plant genetic resources • Requested 3,408 accessions • Clover CGC member – 15 years • Clover CGC Chair – 3 years • Attended three CGC Chairs meetings

3. NPGS experience • Research Leader – 9 years • Plant Genetic Resources Conservation Unit, Griffin, GA • Annual clover curator – 9 years • Sorghum coordinator – 9 years • Currently acting sorghum curator • Acting Vigna curator – 3 years

4. NPGS experience • CGCs for Griffin collections • Capsicum (pepper) • Clover and Special Purpose Legumes • Cucurbit • Forage and Turf Grass • New Crops • Peanut • Sorghum and Millet • Sweetpotato • Vigna (cowpea, mung bean)

5. NPGS experience • CGCs for Griffin collections • Capsicum (pepper) (2) • Clover and Special Purpose Legumes (9) • Cucurbit (1) • Forage and Turf Grass (8) • New Crops (2) • Peanut (3) • Sorghum and Millet (9) • Sweetpotato(3) • Vigna (cowpea, mung bean) (4)

6. Expectations – Plant breeder and CGC member • Large, genetically-diverse collection that contained all the variation that I needed. • All accessions viable and available. • All accessions completely characterized for all descriptors. • Viewed GRIN as a big spreadsheet with a lot of holes that needed to be filled.

7. Realities – Research Leader and Curator • Financial and physical resources limit the size of plant genetic resources collections. • Germination testing and seed regeneration take labor, time, and money. • Viability, availability, and backups are higher priorities than characterization/evaluation.

8. Realities – Everything takes money and labor Sample GS-4 salary (x$1,000) at Griffin Number of federal employees at Griffin *Graph from NPGCC presentation by Peter Bretting (2010).

9. Realities – Everything takes time • If an action by one person takes one minute to complete for one accession: • 60 accessions per hour • 480 accessions per day • 2,400 accessions per week • 37.8 weeks (8+ months) for all 90,668 accessions at Griffin

10. Realities – Everything takes time • Germination testing • Since 2002, 67% of accessions tested • Deposit seed in -18 C for long-term storage • Since 2001, bulk of seed for 70% of accessions are in -18 C storage

11. How can CGCs help? • Give advice (gaps in collection, acquisitions, duplicates) • Inform curator and RL of users’ concerns. • Provide characterization and evaluation data for GRIN • once the data has been published. • Provide information on use of plant genetic resources in publications and cultivar development. • Suggest improvements to NPGS (collection, descriptors, GRIN, data).

12. Goals – Successful CGC/Curator Interaction • Develop and preserve excellent, useful plant genetic resources collections. • Work together to improve plant genetic resources collections. • Be persistent in making progress (it takes time!) • Help get the collections to where they should be. • Look ahead to the future and future use of plant genetic resources.

13. After all, great germplasm collectionsaren’t built in a day!