Survey of Seed Banks for Moringa Accessions

Reported here are the results of our informal online survey of seed banks for moringa seed inventories conducted in June 2017.  We will update this as new information becomes available.

 

Collections of Living Material (1)

The International Moringa Germplasm Collection (IMGC) houses living material of 12 of the 13 Moringa species and has been established as a resource for scientific research on the basic biology of moringa and investigation of applied uses such as nutrition, cancer chemoprevention, biofuels, and water clarification.  It is managed by Dr. Mark Olson, of the Instituto de Biología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and is located on the coast of Jalisco, Mexico.  The IMGC does not operate a seed bank.

 

Collections Holding Moringa Seeds (4)

1. The EHCO Community, is a non-profit organization headquartered in Florida that promotes agricultural projects focused on reducing hunger. EHCO has a seed bank used to support its projects and the bank was reportedly a source for moringa seeds.  A search of EHCO’s seed bank offerings performed on June 5, 2017 found only packet offerings of Moringa stenopetala and no other species or varieties of moringa.

 

2. Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) reportedly has a moringa germplasm collection. Seeds of varieties of vegetable crop developed by TNAU are provided through its Seed Centre to farmers and seed companies in India.  A search of its vegetable seed catalog conducted on June 6, 2017 found only one listing for moringa seeds of the PKM-1 variety.  It is unclear if TNAU maintains a seed bank and if it is accessible to the public.  We will investigate this further and provided updated information as it becomes available.

 

3. USDA Germplasm Collection. The U.S. National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS) is a collaborative effort to safeguard the genetic diversity of agriculturally important plants. The NPGS is managed by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the in-house research agency of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The mission of the NPGS is to support agricultural production by:

• acquiring crop germplasm
• conserving crop germplasm
• evaluating and characterizing crop germplasm
• documenting crop germplasm
• distributing crop germplasm

The Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN) is the webserver for the NPGS and is used to search its database for accessions in the germplasm collection.  We performed a search of the NPGS/GRI for Moringa seeds on June 5, 2017. It yielded only one active accession for Moringa oleifera seeds obtained from a Florida source in 1974.  Another search for inactive and historic accessions indicated that additional accessions of this species were previously held.  No records of active, inactive or historic accessions of other Moringa species were found.

4.  The famous Svalbard Global Seed Vault located in the permafrost, 1300 kilometers beyond the Arctic Circle, is the world’s largest secure seed storage facility. It is operated by the Norwegian government, Ministry of Agriculture and Food, and coordinates with the Nordic Gene Resource Centre and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The vault holds duplicates of seed sample stores in national, regional and international gene banks. Seeds are sent there for safe and secure long-term storage in cold and dry rock vaults.

Inventories of seeds held in the vault were downloaded from the vault website on June 5, 2017.  The vault contained only five accessions of moringa seeds: two of Moringa oleifera and three of Moringa stenopetala totaling 1900 seeds.

5. The World Vegetable Center (WVS) headquartered in Tainan City, southern Taiwan operates what is probably the largest program focused on breeding and development of tropical plants and it maintains a large public domain germplasm collection. The center’s AVRDC Vegetable Genetic Resources Information System (AVGRIS) information system manages the data of all vegetable germplasm conserved in the AVRDC genebank and is searchable.We searched on AVGRIS on for moringa accessions on June 5, 2017 and found 32 active listings, the most we found in our informal survey of seed banks.  All the active listings were for Moringa oleifera; no other Moringa species were listed.  Most of the seeds were at least several years old and majority of the seeds were obtained from Thailand.

 

Update:  A collection of Moringa peregrina seeds from the remote mountains in Jordan’s southern rift valley has been made and stored in the gene banks of both NCARE and Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank (Abulaila 2018).

 

Abulaila K. 2018. Kew Science. News. Plant story – helping to conserve Moringa peregrina, a very useful tree.  https://www.kew.org/science/news/plant-story-helping-to-conserve-moringa-peregrina-a-very-useful-tree  [accessed 26 August 2018]