DivSeek is a global initiative to harness crop diversity in genebanks for food security and climate change adaptation

1. Diversity Seek (DivSeek)
A global initiative
to harness crop diversity
for food security and climate adaptation

2. • Declining rate of yield increase
• Declining food reserves
• Growing populations
• More demanding populations
 need +60% cereals by 2050
• Climate change
The challenge

3. The solutions
• Increase resource use
– Expand land
– Inputs (water, fertilizers)
• Decrease waste
• Refine agronomic
practices
• Accelerate genetic
improvement

4. Crop diversity: opportunity
• Fundamental raw
materials for crop
improvement
• >7 M accessions in
>1,700 genebanks

7. Crop diversity: challenge
• Profoundly
underutilized
• Searching for needle
in a haystack
• Big, largely untapped
opportunity
6%
94%
Maize allelic diversity
Sarah Hearne, CIMMYT

8. Game-changers
• Increasing emphasis on
using natural variation
• New technologies
Ed Buckler (Cornell): speed of
DNA sequencing has increased
25 million-fold in 20 years
– From home  office
– From home  sun

9. Many projects out there
3,000 Rice Genomes Project (IRRI) ✔ ✔
Seeds of Discovery (CIMMYT) ✔ ✔ ✔
Digital Seed Bank (GPC) ✔ ✔ ✔
Crop Wild Relatives Project (Crop Trust) ✔ ✔ ✔
…
Convergence of ideas &
concepts across crops
and organizations

10. Diversity Seek
Networking of like-minded efforts to
harness crop diversity for food security
White paper: http://www.divseek.org

11. Cross-crop learning & integration
• Advocate common data standards and legal frameworks to
assemble network of interoperable data sets & repositories
• Common research approaches for crops with similar biology
• Cross-cutting tools and platforms & capacity-strengthening

12. DivSeek stakeholders
• Demand-driven agricultural research
– Broaden the genetic base of breeding programs
– Accelerate genetic gains
• Discovery-driven fundamental research
– Stimulate discoveries that generate spill-over effects
into crop improvement
• Genebanks
– From ‘warehouses’ to research centers that actively
investigate the genetic potential of their holdings

13. First Partners’ Assembly
• 69 organizations from 30 countries signed
expression of interest
• First Partners’ Assembly in Jan 2015
• Charter approved:
– The mission of DivSeek is to cross-link, support and add
value to individual activities that harness the power of
crop diversity for food and nutritional security and societal
and economic benefits, by enabling breeders and
researchers to mobilize genetic variation in order to
accelerate crop improvement.

15. DivSeek Facilitation Unit

16. An invitation to join
info@divseek.org
www.divseek.org