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The European Central Lathyrus spp. Database
Manager: Daniel Combes
IBEAS, University of Pau, France
URL: http://www.univ-pau.fr
EUROPEAN CENTRAL FORAGES DATABASES 31
As mentioned in the last joint ECP/GR workshop in Budapest, the Lathyrus database in Pau
contains about 4000 accessions. It includes four wild or semi-wild perennial species –
L. heterophyllus, L. latifolius, L. sylvestris and L. tuberosus – and two annual species – L. sativus
(grass pea), which is cultivated, and L. cicera, which is assumed to be one of the wild
ancestors of L. sativus.
The database was established in 1985 after a meeting on Lathyrus held in Pau. It is
updated regularly (every year approximately). Countries of origin of the accessions are
mostly European, but include North Africa, Middle East, Ethiopia and India. About 40
countries are represented.
Descriptors are the passport descriptors indicated by IPGRI. They have been modified as
suggested in Budapest to provide information on genus (in Pau, until then, it did not seem
useful, as only Lathyrus is concerned) and on species (until then we did not mention it, as the
database is subdivided species by species). But as the objective is now a multicrop passport
database, we completely agreed with this modification.
The database has been recently enriched with data on Spanish accessions, kindly
provided by Dr Isaura Martin (Madrid) after the Budapest meeting. The sofwares used in
Pau are both FoxPro and Access. The database is freely available upon request, on floppy
disk or paper.
It is also freely accessible through Internet, on the Web site of the University of Pau (see
above) pointing on 'Recherche' then on 'Biologie'. It is not yet really user-friendly, but in a
few weeks it will be set under Oracle and so this drawback should be abolished. It is also
accessible through Dirk Enneking's CLIMA site (Australia) with whom we are cooperating.
One important point has not really been dealt with: looking for duplicates. In fact, as we
are mostly working with wild species, real duplicates should be rare. A few populations
from the Pau region (Pyrénées mountains) have been collected more than once (mostly
twice) in different years. But, as they are natural cross-pollinated populations, the different
samples are almost certainly genetically different, especially since population sizes are
generally big (100 or more) and we have generally not paid attention to which individuals
have been sampled. So the fact that different accessions have the same descriptors data does
not mean that they are real duplicates and we may have difficulties in asserting it.