National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

I started off my work in Ukraine by looking through all of the Camelina specimens in the herbarium of the M.G. Kholony Institute for Botany. I was surpirsed to find very rare and old collections, the most interesting was without a doubt that of Ivan Schmalhausen, a Ukrainian born scientist who, among other endeavors, used Camelina as an evolutionary model system. As such, it was quite the honor to see his own collections of Camelina and other related species in Brassicaceae. Even better, the herbarium had several specimens from Nikolai Zinger, another early evolutionary biologist in the USSR using Camelina as a model system. Read more about these two soviet biologists in a previous post here. 

Next I visited the MM Hryshko National Botanical Garden in Kiev, where many thousands of lines of various food and ornamental crops are maintained and improved in breeding programs. Among these are several lines of Camelina! I had arrived just a little too late to see the Camelina growing, but the remains of harvested plants weren't difficult to find. 

---

Here they experiment with different winter and spring varieties of Camelina and perform hybridization and growth experiments.