Proposal to Move Urbana Maize Center SparksConcerns

The USDA is proposing to close its Urbana research facility in Illinois, home to programs studying corn, germplasm, genetic mutations, and other critical crop resources. The agency is looking to relocate the work to Ames, Iowa, but University of Illinois Crop Sciences Professor Dr. Martin Bohn, says that move comes with significant consequences.

“So, this is a kind of over the 17 years, this thing grew into something that is highly connected with us here in crop sciences, and it's highly effective and efficient. And now they want to move it to Ames. In Ames, there's also a germ plasm bank, so, but this germ plasm bank has strained with regard to place, and I think in the short term for them it's very difficult to integrate this huge collection that we have here in their collection, so we can move all the seed, but we might lose some of the seed, we might lose, you know, because it's not regenerated, and these, these people, even though they know how to deal with germplasm, they do not have the expertise to deal with these specific materials that we have here.”

Known as the Maize Genetics Cooperation Stock Center. The facility maintains one of the world's most important corn genetics collections, preserving roughly 100,000 unique maize lines.