Scientists at the Ornamental Plant Germplasm Center on Ohio State’s agriculture campus are working to save older varieties of plants.
“We want to preserve plant material for future generations,” said Susan Stieve, a curator at the OPGC. “It’s all about preservation and preserving heirloom varieties.”
Heirloom varieties are plants that might have been in gardens before, but have been phased out by newer breeds of the plants that researchers have created.
In order to rescue these varieties of plants, germplasm – or different plant parts – is collected and saved. Germplasm includes seeds, bulbs, shoot tips, and other living tissue, said Jennifer Ehrenberger, who is also a curator at the OPGC.
The germplasm of many rare varieties of plants are then stored at the center, Stieve said. The center currently stores around 3,000 varieties in the form of seeds and tissue cultures.
Roughly 5,000 seeds are sent from the center to Fort Collins, Colorado for the National Center for Genetic Resource Preservation: the equivalent to a seed museum, Stieve said.
Researchers from around the world can also request seeds or tissue cultures of a variety of the herbaceous ornamental plants, Stieve said.
Herbaceous ornamental plants include flowers such as petunias, chrysanthemums, geraniums, pelargonium, and violas.
“It’s our job to acquire them, and once we get them and the seeds are alive and we have a good quantity, we ship them free of charge to researchers around the world,” Stieve said.
Stieve said seed and plant tissue preservation is important in case newer varieties that have been bred by researchers are found to have growing problems.
“Because what happens, for example, is a petunia breeding company might not like the older variety and 20 years down the road they might find that the varieties they have are all susceptible to a certain disease and they’ve lost the gene for that trait so they can no longer breed it back in,” Stieve said. “By us conserving older heirloom types or wild plant material, they can get plant material from us and they can work it back into their breeding program.”
The plants are grown in greenhouses, Stieve said. Once a plant is mature enough and has produced enough seeds, the seeds are removed and then separated from the other plant material and kept in a storage cooler.
“Seeds are kept alive at a minimum of five years and some can go 15 to 20 years,” Stieve said. “It depends on the species and how things live.”
The center, which is about four years old, is sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture, Ehrenberger said.
The center is one of 28 plant germ plasm centers in the country, Ehrenberger said. Depending on the location of the center, different seeds and plant tissue are stored.
Stieve said the center at OSU is different from other centers.
“We’re the only ones focusing on herbaceous ornamental plants exclusively,” Stieve said.
“Most centers are for food crops,” said Daniel Tay, the director of the center. “This is the first time a center like this has been established, so it’s very unique.”
The center employs student workers, who are not all horticulture majors, to work in the greenhouses as well as in the laboratory separating the seeds from the plants, Stieve said.
The students are given the chance to learn a trade that they could go on and use later in life, Ehrenberger said.
