PLANT GENETIC RESOURCES CONSERVATION UNIT

The Plant Genetic Resources Conservation Unit (PGRCU) exists to conserve plant genetic resources for users today and for future generations. The PGRCU is a cooperative effort supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service (USDA, ARS) and the Southern State Agricultural Experiment Stations. Located on the Griffin Campus of the University of Georgia, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the PGRCU is one of four regional plant introduction stations and is also known as Multistate Research Project S-009. The PGRCU is charged with the responsibility to acquire, characterize, maintain, evaluate, document, and distribute genetic resources of agronomic and horticultural crops. Objectives include:

• Conserve genetic resources and associated information for a broad spectrum of crops and related species.
• Develop and apply new or improved evaluation procedures and marker-based approaches to assess diversity of genetic resources in the collections and evaluate materials for useful traits.
• Transfer technology to researchers and plant breeders in the Southern Region and worldwide in the form of plant genetic resources and associated information.