Cool season food legume germplasm project focuses on the conservation, characterization and utilization of pea, lentil, chickpea, faba bean, grass pea, lupin and Trigonella genera.
There are more than 24,000 accessions in the cool-season grass and safflower collections. Major goals are increasing seed, gathering accession data and images, and managing the International Safflower Genetic Resources web site http://safflower.wsu.edu/.
The Horticulture Crops program conserves, characterizes and acquires accessions of over 232 genera of food, forage, medicinal and restoration species. Major collections are beet, lettuce, Allium, milk-vetch and sanfoin.
The bean collection is composed of over 17,000 accessions consisting of 57 taxa. Common bean is the largest species with over 13,000 genetic varieties. The primary focus is on seed conservation, production, characterization, imaging, and distribution.
USDA Temperate-adapted Forage Legume Genetic Resources project conserves, grows, and distributes seed and information for 13,000 accessions of alfalfa, clover, trefoil and wild relatives to users worldwide.
Mission
The primary mission of the Plant Germplasm Introduction and Testing Research Unit is to acquire, maintain, evaluate, enhance, characterize, document and distribute assigned genetic resources of the USDA-ARS National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS), and to conduct research related to our primary mission.