Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research

Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research
Type	Research institute and federal gene bank
Website	ipk-gatersleben.de
Founded	1943
Base	Gatersleben, Germany
Scope	Crop plants worldwide
Focus	Plant genetics and the conservation of crop genetic resources
Other sites	Genebank Information System

The Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (Leibniz-Institut für Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforschung, IPK) is a plant research institute at Gatersleben in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. It was founded in 1943 near Vienna as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Crop Plant Research and re-established as IPK in 1992. Its gene bank is the Federal Ex Situ Genebank for Agricultural and Horticultural Crops, with 151,775 accessions of 2,849 species. On 6 November 2026 it had 56 cannabis accessions registered with the Food and Agriculture Organization, 19 of them landraces.

From Tuttenhof to Gatersleben

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Crop Plant Research was founded in 1943 on the Tuttenhof estate near Vienna. War moved it in 1945 to Stecklenberg in the Harz, and it settled at Gatersleben in October of that year. In 1948 it was incorporated into the academy of sciences of what became the German Democratic Republic. From 1970 it was the Central Institute for Genetics and Crop Plant Research (ZIGuK). By 1992 its collection had grown to almost 96,000 accessions.

The institute was re-established as IPK in 1992. Between 2001 and 2003 about 50,000 accessions from the former West German gene bank at Braunschweig were transferred to Gatersleben. The merger of 2003 made IPK the seat of the Federal Ex Situ Genebank for Agricultural and Horticultural Crops. The institute took its present name in 2006.

The gene bank

The collection is kept at three sites. Gatersleben is the main one. Malchow, on the island of Poel, keeps oil and fodder crops, and Groß Lüsewitz keeps potatoes. At Gatersleben most of the seed is stored in cold rooms at −18 °C. Malchow stores its active collection at −5 °C and its base collection at −20 °C. Over 2,500 accessions, most of them potatoes, are kept in liquid nitrogen at −196 °C. Safety duplicates of more than 69,000 accessions, about 46 per cent of the collection, are in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

In its first years the gene bank could store seed only at ambient temperature, so each accession had to be regrown every three to five years. Seed at −18 °C is now tested for germination after 8 to 20 years, and an accession is considered for regrowing when germination has fallen below 70 per cent of its starting value. Between 8,000 and 10,000 accessions are regrown or multiplied in the fields each year. Cross-pollinated crops such as rye are grown in separation strips or in more than 170 small isolation greenhouses. In 2013 wireworms attacked the collection of Allium. Fifty-two accessions were lost and 73 were saved by replanting.

The institute also keeps a herbarium. Its Genebank Information System gives access to herbarium specimens and photographs beside the data on the origin and naming of each accession.

Cannabis in the collection

On 6 November 2026 the gene bank had 56 cannabis accessions registered in the FAO's Global Information System, numbered CAN 16 to CAN 71. Nineteen carry the status of landrace or traditional cultivar and 17 of improved cultivar. The rest have no status. The earliest was acquired in 1978 and the latest in 2020.

Most of the landraces came from the institute's own collecting missions. CAN 16 was gathered in the Low Beskids of Slovakia on 16 August 1977. Missions to southern Italy brought seed from Soveria Mannelli in Calabria in 1984 and from a market at San Marzano di San Giuseppe in Apulia in 1988. Two came from North Korea: CAN 20, collected a few kilometres beyond Kosong towards Mount Kumgang on 12 November 1985, and CAN 23, from a cooperative farm for medicinal plants at Rinsan in North Hwanghae, collected on 30 October 1987. CAN 22, entered as Cannabis sativa subsp. spontanea, was collected at about 1,400 m near Shatili in Khevsureti, Georgia, on a mission of 1986. The same lot is G 33598 in the National Plant Germplasm System of the United States.

Romania gave eight accessions, seven of them collected on missions in 1993 and 1994 in Maramureș and the Apuseni Mountains, under local names recorded as cinepa, cunepa and, marked as Ukrainian, conopla. One more came from Đakovo in Croatia in 1996, and three from Turkey, from a shop in Istanbul, a market at Gigekli and Burdur.

Later accessions came by transfer. Twelve, among them Fibrimon, Kompolti and Kongo Hanf, arrived in 2006 from a federal breeding-research collection at Ahrensburg. The Federal Plant Variety Office (Bundessortenamt) supplied cultivars between 2003 and 2020, among them Futura, Fasamo and Ferimon.

Researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew obtained 51 hemp seed accessions from 14 countries from the gene bank for a study of the chemistry of hemp seed published in 2023.

Terms of supply

The gene bank is not a commercial supplier of seeds and plants. It provides very small quantities, as is customary in exchanges between gene banks and botanic gardens, and has charged a handling fee for every request since July 2016. Orders go through the Genebank Information System after the requester has created an account. In general the requester must conclude a Standard Material Transfer Agreement with IPK before delivery, and material is usually sent within four weeks of the signed agreement. For private persons, the gene bank usually supplies only tubers from its potato collection at Groß Lüsewitz. More than 1.2 million samples had been distributed by 2025.

Accessions

Herbarium specimens held by the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research.

	Collector	Collected	Country	Catalogue number
Pistrick 182 (1987)	K. Pistrick	6 August 1987	Mongolia	0007976

See also

• Gene bank
• Germplasm
• N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources
• National Plant Germplasm System