National Plant Germplasm System

The earliest components of today’s NPGS date to 1898 and the USDA Plant Exploration Office and the National Small Grain Collection, with major expansions in the late 1940s with the establishment of four regional plant introduction stations and the interregional potato station, the National Seed Storage Laboratory (now the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation) in 1958, the cotton and soybean germplasm collection in the 1970s, and the mid-1980s with the addition of nine genebank sites with primarily clonally-propagated crops. Currently the NPGS comprises 20 different genebank sites, the GRIN-Global information management system, and 43 Crop Germplasm Committees.