Chief Specialist of the department on “International relations, information and coordination” and dissertator of the Genetic Resources Institute of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences Ilhama Mirzaliyeva was sent on 1 week scientific business trip to Prague, the CzechRepublic.
She attended a GRIN-Global Workshop (GRIN - The Germplasm Resources Information Network) with financial assistance of Global Trust Fund on Plant Diversity at the Plant Genetic Resources Institute in Prague, the Czech Republic.
GRIN-Global (GG) is an applied programme - server based information database providing storage, management and distribution in global scale of relevant information with plant genetic resources for the genebanks.
The purpose of GRIN-Global is to make a wide scale version of the Germplasm Resources Information Network convenient for use by all genebanks in the world.
The preliminary version 1.0.7 was realised as a result of the joint effort of the Global Trust Fund, Biodiversity International and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in December 2011.
Around 30 scientists and specialists from 18 countries including Azerbaijan, Colombia, Lebanon, Jordan, France, Mexico, Peru, Belgium, Portugal, Germany and India attended the workshop.
The workshop instructors were Dr. Martin Reisinger, US office of the Global Diversity Fund and Juan Carlos Alarcon, CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, Mexico).
Creation of the global information system on plant genetic resources and its integration into the national systems, as well as issues on information management and its security was widely discussed at the workshop. During the workshop a visit to the National Seed Gene Bank of the Czech Republic was made and bilateral relations discussed.