Brassica germplasm collection
Collection of seed samples from local varieties of the main brassica crops in Galicia, Brassica oleracea, B. rapa and B. napus, started in 1985. . Collected cultivars had horticultural and forage uses.
Brassica oleracea includes kales (B. oleracea var. acephala), cabbages (B. oleracea var. capitata) and Tronchuda cabbages (B. oleracea var. costata), crops that receive the common name of cabbages. B. rapa includes turnips, turnip greens and turnip tops and, finally, B. napus accessions correspond to the form known as nabicol or leaf rape.
Prospecting for new local varieties of brassicas was temporarily interrupted for one decade (from the late 80s until the late 90s). More recently, the Galician brassica collection was completed, and accessions from other Spanish provinces (Asturias, Castilla la Mancha and the Canary Islands) and from other countries were included in the brassica collection of MBG.
This collection works as an active collection since its creation in the 80s. It constitutes an important collection, singular for the uniqueness of the crops that are conserved, most germplasm being adapted to the European Atlantic conditions with high intra and intervarietal variability.
The maintenance and study of this collection is funded by R&D projects of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.
The following table summarizes the contents of the brassica germplasm bank:
Species | Subspecies | Crop | Origin | TOTAL | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Galicia | Asturias | Canary Islands | Castilla y León | Catalonia | Portugal | Poland | Others | ||||
Brassica napus | pabularia | nabicol | 62 | 62 | |||||||
oleifera | colza | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
unclassified | 2 | 2 | |||||||||
Total species | 64 | 1 | 65 | ||||||||
Brassica oleracea | acephala | kale | 209 | 42 | 1 | 2 | 254 | ||||
capitata | cabbage | 49 | 49 | ||||||||
costata | Tronchuda cabbage | 3 | 1 | 4 | |||||||
unclassified | 14 | 19 | 3 | 33 | |||||||
Total species | 275 | 42 | 19 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 343 | |||
Brassica rapa | rapa | turnips, turnip greens, turnip tops | 224 | 12 | 2 | 238 | |||||
TOTAL ENTRIES IN THE BANK BY ORIGIN AREA | 563 | 54 | 19 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 646 |