Lana de Bruijn

As a newcomer to the potato world, I have now been working for a year and a half as curator of the potato collection at the gene bank of the Centre for Genetic Resources, the Netherlands (CGN). You might imagine a gene bank as a large, cold vault full of seeds, and that is partly true: the seeds are kept safely at -20°C in lightly vacuumed bags. But in addition to this cool space, there are a lot of challenging processes a curator has to deal with.