Amman-AlBaqaa
The National Agricultural Research Center (NARC), launched the GRIN-GLOBAL System, a system for Genetic Resources Documentation with support of Crop Trust (Global Crop diversity trust)
Dr.Nizar Haddad , the Director General of NARC , indicated that such a system should help familiarize researches to Plant Genetic Resources especially what is known as Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and spotting light on importance and vitality of their conservation and use. It will be a platform for exchanging information access of genetic resources and a tool toward easier signing relevant contracts. Haddad added that Jordan is the second country in the Arab World after Tunisia, and indeed, the eighth among the world to use such interactive system; at the time being, benefiting from Tunisian experience. Thus, an advanced training course is being organized at NARC headquarter to build the capacity of 14 participants from biodiversity research directorate and the IT department, as well.
It is worth mentioning that NARC hosts the national seed bank and the Herbarium that have collections of 5.000 seed accessions and over 4.000 plant specimens, respectively, some of the herbarium specimens were collected by late 18s.This is considered a national depository available for scientists , academics and researchers locally and overseas.
The Tunisian IT expert, Eng,Yasseen Al Nahdi, responsible to installing the system at NARC IT dept. explicitly indicated that such a system would enable specialists and researchers of genetic resources access data , of sample collections , facilitate daily operations, including morphological and genetic characterization and exchange of information.