Gene bank management
Know what you hold, prove it, share it
Akervo manages a living collection. It serves an animal genetic resources bank as well as a seed bank, because animal and plant are two profiles of one product rather than two separate programmes.
Akervo comes from acervo genético, the Spanish term for gene pool — the one word that covers animal and plant without favouring either.
The problem is not the software, it is the notebook
Most living collections run on a spreadsheet and on the memory of whoever has been in the lab for twenty years. That works until it stops working, and it always fails in the same order.
The inventory stops matching
A tank holding thousands of straws, or a cold room holding thousands of packets, counted by whoever remembers to update the file. The cost is not paid the day it drifts: it is paid the day material has to ship and cannot be found.
Material has no passport
Where it came from, who deposited it, under which agreement, what health status it carries. Without that trail it cannot be shared with guarantees, published in a registry or justified in a funding call — which is what the bank's budget rests on.
Sharing is an email thread
The request arrives by email, the decision is taken in a conversation nobody writes down, and six months later no one knows who holds what or what it was used for.
Underneath the three sits a fourth problem, and it is the one that kills collections: knowledge lives in people. When the curator retires, half the meaning of the collection leaves with them.
Three specific commitments
Recorded stock is real stock
Every container with its location and quantity, every movement with its trail, and a physical count procedure to reconcile when reality and record drift apart.
Every unit carries its history
From source to destination, with the processing, health and viability events that substantiate it, and an audit trail of who changed what.
Reports come out of the system
The annual report, SDG indicator 2.5.1b, the submission to a national or European registry. Generated, not drafted.
Who it is for
Anyone holding a living collection, whatever sits behind it.
| Animal and plant genetic resources banks | public and private |
| Breeders' and seed conservation associations | where the depositor is the member |
| Private conservators and foundations | collections without an administration behind them |
| Zoos, aquaria and botanic gardens | living collections with a conservation programme |
| Universities and research centres | collections tied to their own projects |
| Conservation networks and programmes | national or regional |