Plant Genetic Resources – Laboratories

Facilities - Ramiah Gene Bank

The Ramiah Gene Bank (RGB)houses both medium term and long cold storage units for genetic conservation of orthodox seeds of agri-horticultutal crop germplasm with a capacity to store one lakh germplasm accessions. RGB is fully equipped with state-of –art facilities for seed viability testing, silica gel desiccation, barcoding and TNGRID data base for documentation and vacuum packing of seeds.

Cyro-conservation Gene Bank

This massive facility developed under the NADP funding would primarily serve to store the seeds of farmers’ varieties of major crops for posterity. Besides, equipments such as rate controlled freezer and Differential Scanning calorimeter available in this lab would be utilized for developing safe and efficient cryo-conservation procedures for vegetatively propagated and recalcitrant crop species.

DNA fingerprinting laboratory

This laboratory is fully equipped with basic and modern facilities for carrying out advanced molecular research to support plant breeding programs. In addition, this lab is also entrusted to perform DNA fingerprinting work for the pre-release cultures of TNAU mandate crops.

Tissue culture laboratory

This laboratory mainly supports to conduct experiments on optimizing and validating cryo-conservation protocols for vegetatively propagated crop germplasm such as sugarcane, cassava and banana, besides being used by the students of both M.Sc. and Ph.D programmes to undertake their thesis research work.