By Abigail Bottar
The U.S. Department of Agriculture wants to move two of the nation’s most important seed banks from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — even as some experts raise concerns that change could harm corn and soybean research.
The Maize Genetics Cooperation Stock Center includes 100,000 corn stocks representing genetic mutants, some that were collected as long as 100 years ago and are irreplaceable. The National Soybean Germplasm Collection is the only public soybean seed bank in the country and holds nearly the entire crop’s genetic diversity.
Samples from the collections at the University of Illinois are shipped to scientists around the world who are studying crop yield and disease resistance.
“Colleagues in Europe and Africa and Asia and Latin America, they also contribute to this resource and they also use that resource a lot,” said University of Illinois crop sciences professor Martin Bohn, who uses the maize stock center for his research.
Both collections have been housed on the university’s campus for decades, but the USDA is proposing moving the maize center to Ames, Iowa, and the soybean collection to Columbia, Missouri.
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