Back to: Propagating Seedstring from Gametophytes

Biosecurity in the nursery and lab spaces is essential to providing appropriate seed to farmers. This should be a consideration from initial sorus collection to when farmers pick up their seed. Every spool and culture in your nursery should have a unique label for tracking purposes. GreenWave uses a simple numbering system for spools and a more complex informational label for gametophyte cultures.

Along with mitigating contamination outbreaks, good biosecurity is important for permitting reasons. Gametophytes and seed from different regions or collection locations, different species, and contaminated seed should all be kept separate. Regulatory rules might prohibit farmers from planting seed from outside a given area, so it is important for us as seed suppliers to ensure the seed we give to farmers is within regulatory guidelines. Separate your seed spools in tanks based on their source and species. Plan your nursery setup with this in mind.

During gametophyte culture maintenance, water changes should be done based on species and region. Anytime that you begin working with a new region, or a new species within a region, the working spaces should be wiped down thoroughly. Additionally, all contaminated cultures for a region should be handled last, after dealing with uncontaminated cultures. Because we avoid using contaminated cultures in seed production, it is best practice to keep all contaminated cultures for a region on a quarantine shelf together. Click on the buttons to see the flow chart that can be used for sorting cultures:

In addition to tank separation in the nursery, biosecurity is very important during sorus collection and release. When sorus is collected from multiple locations in a day, it is important to keep the blades from each location separate while processing and releasing. During processing, clean containers should be used for each location. If you are using the dip method, you should also make new baths between locations. Once the sorus is processed, store different locations in separate vessels or with multiple layers of paper towels between. When you are releasing, take special care to make sure no cross-contamination occurs. One drop of release water can easily carry hundreds of meiospores.