Extension for Seed Health Laboratory for Increased Seed Health Indexing Lebanon

The current SHU facility is a makeshift created on emergency basis to accommodate staff and labs shifted from Aleppo, Syria. The current lab capacity facilitates annual testing of 30,000 samples, while the demand is at least twice. Also, seed health testing procedures require certain conditions to implement testing efficiently and some critical modifications to the current lab are highly required. In fact, the current space available for SHU at ICARDA’s Terbol station is 114 m² and the testing for incoming & outgoing seeds and for all seed-borne pathogens (nematodes, bacterial, fungal & viral diseases) are carried out in small space (8 x 4 m) which means defiant slowing the indexing throughput and delaying gene banking activities, including conservation and international exchanges. Overcoming this limitation requires urgent expansion of SHU laboratory.

To increase the throughput requires expansion of the laboratory space to decongest the existing lab and create more space for the workers' operation. This will be achieved by creating additional laboratory space to the first floor. This work will be facilitated by the ICARDA’s engineering service unit under the guidance of the SHU head. Due to this, the intervention strategy will be based on the following activities: - Develop laboratory extension plan; - Invite expert engineers for planning; - Procurement of materials and installation; - Lab reorganization and pilot testing; - Final report.

The expansion of the laboratory will have an impact on efficiency both on a quantitative level, by increasing the yearly number of tested samples, and on a qualitative level, by increasing the seed health indexing. This will allow the laboratory to meet testing demands and give high quality testing results. Consequently, other processes will be positively affected, such as the cleaning of infected samples as well the ability to conserve more materiel in Genebanks in Lebanon and Svalbard.