The world’s largest collection of banana germplasm and the most extensive source of information on banana genetic resources.
INTERNATIONAL TRANSIT CENTRE
The International Transit Centre (ITC) holds the world’s largest collection of bananas, the International Musa Germplasm Collection, which is managed by Bioversity International. Hosted by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, the genebank has more than 1,500 accessions. Most of them are cultivars. The others are breeding material, including improved hybrids, and wild relatives, including DH Pahang, the accession that was used for sequencing the Musa acuminata genome.
Number of accessions: 1566 (as of 8 April 2019)
Available for distribution: 937 (as of 8 April 2019)
The ITC is part of ProMusa, a network of people promoting scientific discussions on bananas which also manages:
- the Musalit bibliographical database, which contains more than 17,000 references to published literature and informally published documents in various languages, more than 40% of which are open access.
- the Musarama image bank which provides access to photos on bananas. Its aim is to illustrate all aspects of growing bananas and doing research on them.
- the Musa Germplasm Information System (MGIS) is a database of phenotypic and genomic information on accessions of bananas (both wild and cultivated) conserved in field and in vitro genebanks.
Creation date: 1985
Access & costs: The accessions that have been indexed virus negative are available upon request and can be ordered online. The material is distributed under the terms and conditions of a Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA) of the Multilateral System of Access and Benefit Sharing of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
It is also possible to send germplasm to the ITC for safety duplication and sharing with the research community or other interested parties.
Website: http://www.promusa.org/ITC
Contact: Ines Van den houwe, Genebank curator - I.vandenhouwe@cgiar.org