About the RDSC
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The mission of the Rutgers Duckweed Stock Cooperative (RDSC) is to serve as a comprehensive, accessible, and reliable resource that will promote the growth of the duckweed research community.
Under the leadership of its founding director, Prof. Eric Lam, Professor of Plant Biology at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey), the RDSC is actively curating, cataloging, maintaining, and distributing living specimen of characterized duckweed strains from across the globe and making samples from the collection available to researchers in both academia and industry. Scientifically, the RDSC is also interested in investigating the large genetic diversity of duckweeds, e.g. by undertaking systematic comparison of their genetic relationships, as well as the various strains’ metabolite content and growth characteristics under a range of environmental conditions. Additionally, the RDSC collaborates closely with other colleagues in the field to carry out targeted reference genome assemblies, examining intraspecific genomic variances through large scale re-sequencing projects, as well as targeted growth rate comparisons in particular subgroups of duckweed clones in the collection. In this way, the RDSC enables a larger user base to access and mine the genetic variance in the duckweed collection for new biology or desirable traits. The RDSC was established in 2009 with the acquisition of strains from the Biolex Corporation (North Carolina, USA), 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 well as from Prof. Elias Landolt in Zurich, Switzerland, a few years before he passed away in 2013. Later, in 2022, after the transfer of the Landolt collection to Milan, Italy, at the Istituto Biologia e Biotecnologia Agraria - CNR under the supervision of Prof. Laura Morello, the RDSC also carried out an exchange of about 70 clones between our two collections. As of October 2024, the RDSC has 894 duckweed clones available for distribution. These are collected from all continents except Antarctica, and the RDSC continues to add to its collection through donations, curations and exchanges with other collections worldwide. |
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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