Svalbard Seed Vault - how many tomato varieties?

[cleo88]

Hi,
I'm giving a little Tomato Talk at a small school next week, and I have a slide about the Svalbard Seed vault. From the internet, I have learned that there are now over 250 million seeds in there, and over half a million varieites of plants. But I had trouble finding out how many TOMATO varieties are in there, and of course that is the most important thing to me, being a tomatophile. Does anyone happen to know this?

[ireilly]

Here's what was sorted from the "genus" spreadsheet on this page for the genus Lycopersicon. I uploaded a jpg of the slightly better formatted output of the spreadsheet sort. But you can see they say 1938 accessions, 558425 seeds, 35 taxa, 6 genebanks. Not sure how often this is updated.

The link:

http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by ireilly

Here's what was sorted from the "genus" spreadsheet on this page for the genus Lycopersicon. I uploaded a jpg of the slightly better formatted output of the spreadsheet sort. But you can see they say 1938 accessions, 558425 seeds, 35 taxa, 6 genebanks. Not sure how often this is updated.

The link:

http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/

But the current accepted genus name of tomatoes is Solanum and some places use that and some still stick to the older Lycopersicon.

I fooled around with the link for a bit and then gave up, primarily b'c a tennis match I want to see from Indian Wells, CA, is about to start.

Sorry about that. Cleo, I can tell you that I was not thrilled when SSE sent tomato seeds to Svalbard and that's b'c for many years SSE would send money to listers of new varieties and ask for a sample to be sent back to SSE for permanent storage. I always sent back the money and always thought that my seeds would go into the seedbank at SSE and I'm sure others did as well.

I don't know which varieties were sent, nolist has beenmade available, or if indeed any of them were ones that I first listed, but it's just my own opinion that SSE did not own those seeds, neither did I if one to get technical about it, and it would have been nice if they had contcted the first listers where possible, those who sent in the first seed samples, to ask if they had any objections to the seeds being sent to Svalbard.

And especially so since it was also said that backup for SSE in IA was the NSSL USDA site in Fort Collins, CO.


I don't think Svalbard itself is the issue. It might be better to try and estimate how many tomato varieties/accessions are in long term storage at many seedbanks around the world. On one page at the above link I did read such a list and there were lots of places that I would have thought might have contributed germplasm, but didn't.

[ireilly]

Yes, I looked for the newer name first but when I had trouble locating tomatoes, I used one of the links to see what the SSE (I'm ducking when I mention them ) sent in, then realized they were listed as the older name. But I would be lying if I said I looked comprehensively - thus the link for people to poke around in all the spreadsheets themselves.

Walter

[remy]

Originally Posted by ireilly

Here's what was sorted from the "genus" spreadsheet on this page for the genus Lycopersicon. I uploaded a jpg of the slightly better formatted output of the spreadsheet sort. But you can see they say 1938 accessions, 558425 seeds, 35 taxa, 6 genebanks. Not sure how often this is updated.

The link:

http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/

That's odd since I did a search, and it worked out to be more than 1938.
http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/index.php?app=data_unit&inc=search_form&unit=sgsv_ by_species&unit_id=&filter_field=species&filter_op =~*&filter_value=Lycopersicon&field_display=&offse t=0&limit=25&orderby_previous=sgsv_by_species.spec ies&orderby=sgsv_by_species.species&orderdesc=fals e&letter=

Remy

[ireilly]

So since your search was by species and mine by genus it looks like they either have them listed in both formats, or that the spreadsheets have different data in them. The latter may not be likely though, since I did notice that when I left the page alone and went back to it, it seemed to use a connection to a database query behind the links, as the number all went to zero at one point.

[kevinrs]

Searching with vernacular name contains tomato I get 2431 hits.
Not seeing anything on what varieties they are though.

[dustdevil]

I plugged the word "tomato" in the SEARCH engine and it spit out 1,100 accessions. I don't know if they put a cap on it or not...

[kevinrs]

http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/index.ph...=false&letter=

that's the search I did, by clicking seed samples, and chosing vernacular name, and typing tomato

[kevinrs]

One result from my search is a ground cherry "strawberry tomato" the rest are listed mostly as Lycopersicon and the remaining few as Solanum. There are Tomatoes, Garden Tomatoes, Lycopersicon esculentum, Lycopersicon glandulosum, Lycopersicon hirsutum (hairy tomato), Lycopersicon minutum, Lycopersicon pennelli, Lycopersicon peruvianum, Lycopersicon pimpinellifolium(currant tomato)

Not sure how many of these are correctly named, aside from the Lycopersicon/Solanum issue

[cleo88]

Thanks to all that responded. In my presentation on Monday, I might say that there are about two thousand tomato varieties. These are 3rd-to-8th-graders, so I don't feel compelled to get hyper-accurate here - I just thought it would be cool to mention the Doomsday Vault.