A report of the third term of the National BioResource Project-Wheat, Japan: Fiscal year 2014

Shuhei Nasuda

Laboratory of Plant Genetics, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University, Japan

Corresponding author: Shuhei Nasuda

E-mail: nasushu@kais.kyoto-u.ac.jp

The fiscal year 2014 was the third year of the third tem of the National Bioresource Project (NBRP) that have been supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan.  I am very grateful to the researchers involving in the activities of NBRP-Wheat, not only to the members at Kyoto University and at Yokohama City University, but also to the supporting domestic wheat scientists who devoted their precious time to public service.  I shall summarize our activities of the third term of NBRP-Wheat are so far successful. 

We have been working on establishment of a system to preserve seed stocks in a unified format.  To date, we could store the vast majority of accessions stored at the former Plant Germplasm Institute, Kyoto University.  We are struggling with the genetic resources maintained at the Laboratory of Plant Genetics in converting formats of the databases.  The new system would be also applied for the seed stocks kept at the Kihara Institute for Biological Research in near future.  I would like to acknowledge Dr. Miyuki Nitta for her tireless efforts in development of the system.  It is our task to establish a seed storage and distribution systems not to be influenced by retirements of the experiences researchers.  I feel strongly that we need to keep the systems accessible and to be successive by the future wheat researchers.  It is announced that the Japan Agency of Medical Research and Development will supervise whole NBRP activities from the fiscal year 2015.  It is still early to judge what kind of changes would this relocation bring about.  I will try my best to keep the NBRP-Wheat activities supported by the public agencies.