Rocket: a Mediterranean crop for the world - Bioversity International

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ROCKET GENETIC RESOURCES NETWORK
Fig. 1. Uses of rocket throughout the world.
3. Since roughly 50% of the samples are of Italian origin, and since their origin is
not always very clear, it can be speculated that in the present collection of
Eruca there is a certain level of duplication. Sampling has been conducted
occasionally without using a well-defined strategy. In fact, specific collecting
missions have never been mounted for this species. For these reasons, the
genetic resources of Eruca even in Italy have surely been badly sampled and
the variation present in this collection might presumably be little
representative of the area (Fig. 2). On the other hand, it is not possible to
speculate in more detail on this subject, since no study on the genetic
variation of Italian material seems to have been conducted until now.
4. The situation of Diplotaxis genetic resources is quite different. Prof. Gomez
Campo, in the framework of his project on wild Mediterranean Brassicaceae,
and also stimulated by the Rocket Network initiative, has planned ad hoc
collecting missions for all the species belonging to this genus. The result is
that for these species, the sampling is much more uniform (Fig. 3), with their
genetic resources now being safely preserved in the Madrid genebank.
Moreover, Prof. Gomez Campo and Prof. Martínez-Laborde have so far
conducted many studies on the taxonomic and genetic variation of this
collection.
5. Presently, little is known on the collection held by the USDA genebank
(particularly poor is the information on the exact collection sites of these
samples). However, it is likely that much of their material has been obtained
by exchange with European institutions and has not been directly collected by
the USDA. Additionally, some material has a complex origin in the sense that
the provenance written in the data files does not correspond to the country of
origin (this is especially true for material that has undergone exchanges
through various institutions). A list of the USDA material sorted by the
reported origin is given in Table 1. Using the Germplasm Resources
Information Network (GRIN) World Wide Web server and the access via
Internet it has been possible to reconstruct, at least in part, the passport data
of that material.