Cryopreservation – a long term preservation method for clonal crops – International Potato Center

The sustainable long-term conservation of agrobiodiversity safeguards a treasure trove of traits that can be used for research or to ensure food and nutrition security, and inclusive income opportunities, in the future. Breeders need to utilize crop biodiversity to develop varieties that can cope with abiotic and biotic stresses that will intensify under climate change. The International Potato Center (CIP) conserves the clonal crops potato, sweetpotato and other roots and tubers as virus-free plantlets in vitro. This is normally a labor-intensive and expensive endeavor, as plants must be continually propagated in vitro, or grown in field conditions, and are frequently lost through attrition.

Cryopreservation, in contrast, offers a secure, cost- and space-efficient conservation method for preserving clonal crops in liquid nitrogen at -196C. Those frozen accessions should theoretically survive for eons without the need for further renewal. Over a period of just seven years, CIP built up the largest and most diverse potato cryobank collection worldwide, which to date conserves more than 3,300 Andean potato landraces. The cryopreservation protocol applied has been improved continuously and scaled-up to a through-put rate of ~500 potato accessions per year. Recently, our research in cryopreservation lead to a dogma-breaking finding that has produced significant gains in the rewarming and recovery process of cryopreserved potato shoot tips with the full plant recovery rates increasing from 58.2% to 71.6%.

Global Crop Diversity Trust.

Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT