Age of material and initial seed viability
This is to discuss how best to determine age of material in GGCE and how to handle the initial seed viability. @all, your thoughts and feedback are welcome!
Age of material
It is important to know the age of every biological sample in the genebank, regardless of its form (plant, seed, etc.) For some species, age only starts to matter after 10 or more years, for others, we are interested in months, days or even hours.
The database already provides the propagationDate
for each Inventory
. In GGCE, especially for in vitro material, we already use propagationDate
to record the date of subculturing of material. The same can be used for other types of material, including seed.
The age of any Inventory
(i.e. the difference between propagationDate
and today) is expressed in years, months and days. Querying for material that is older than 10 years is as simple as filtering for propagationDate < 2013-APR-06
(since today is 2023 April 6).
Other important dates
There are other important events in the lifecycle of material in the genebank. For seed we usually capture the harvest date, threshing date, date of storage (in MTS/LTS), etc. These are recorded as individual InventoryActions
.
The date of last viability test can be obtained from InventoryViability
, but also from the associated inventory action record.
Initial seed viability
The initial seed viability is measured shortly after material is multiplied/regenerated and the seed is young. Unlike the viability monitoring that is done (years) later, the initial viability is applicable to all inventories that are split from this inventory item at any point in time.
Because the initial viability captures just that, GGCE will maintain only the %
value, but not the date of the actual test.