About the RDSC
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The mission of the Rutgers Duckweed Stock Cooperative (RDSC) is to serve as a centralized resource that will promote the growth of the duckweed research community.
Under the leadership of its founding director, Dr. Eric Lam, Professor of Plant Biology and Pathology at Rutgers University, the RDSC is actively acquiring, cataloging and maintaining living specimens of duckweed strains from across the globe and making samples from the collection available to researchers. Scientifically, the RDSC is also interested in investigating the large genetic diversity of duckweeds, e.g. by undertaking systematic comparison of the various strains’ metabolite contents and growth characteristics under a range of environmental conditions. Additionally, the RDSC collaborates closely with a second duckweed research project at Rutgers, an international effort led by the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, under the auspices of the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Initiative, to sequence the genome (~150 Mb) of the Greater Duckweed (Spirodela polyrhiza). The RDSC was established in 2009 with the acquisition of strains from the Biolex Corporation in North Carolina, in addition to those collected by Todd Michael (then an assistant professor at Rutgers University) and later from Professor Klaus Appenroth at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, Germany. As of October 2013, the RDSC has over 900 different strains, collected from all continents except Antarctica, and it continues to add to its collection. |
Foran Hall, home of the RDSC
Address of the RDSC
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Foran Hall, Room 216 59 Dudley Rd New Brunswick, NJ 08901 |
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