The future of the
SBC looks bright. The building we are constructing in
cooperation with UC Davis will initially house faculty in
genomics and bioinformatics as well as the SBC.
In 2004, those groups will move into a larger facility, and
space will be available to co-locate additional programs with
the SBC. The California Crop Improvement Association has built
a seed laboratory in the new building, and their
administrative units will join us at that time. In addition,
the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
supports the movement of a number of faculty into the facility
having interests in seed and plant reproductive biology,
including asexual plant propagation.
Thus, by about 2005, we will have an institute focusing on
plant reproduction with research and outreach components and
the seed certification and foundation seed programs of the
California Crop Improvement Association. We expect this
institute to have international visibility and impact,
comparable to seed centers at Iowa State University and
Wageningen in The Netherlands. As improvements in crop
protection, productivity and quality increasingly become
biologically based, the importance and value of seeds as the
delivery system for these improvements will also increase.
The SBC is dedicated to playing a positive role in the
further development of seed biology and its applications to
meet the simultaneous demands of feeding the expanding human
population while preserving the agricultural resource base.
