Welcome to EPPO-Q-bank!
A database to support plant pest diagnostic activities
Our objective
The aim of the EPPO-Q-bank is to support diagnostic activities of phytosanitary organizations: national plant protection organizations, general inspection bodies, and private laboratories. The descriptions of the items in the databases are an indispensable tool to identify and detect harmful quarantine organisms.
EPPO-Q-bank comprises data of properly documented species and strains present in collections. Depending on the collection, these may be obtained for further studies or used as controls in identification and detection tests.
The entries in EPPO-Q-bank are updated by a team of curators with taxonomic, phytosanitary and diagnostic expertise from national plant protection organizations world-wide and institutes with connections to relevant phytosanitary collections. The curators are functioning under the supervision of the EPPO Panel on Diagnostics and Quality Assurance and specialized diagnostic EPPO Panels.
History of the Database:
Q-bank a Dutch initiative
The EPPO-Q-bank Database is a database on quarantine pests. This database originally started as part of a Dutch project to strengthen the plant health infrastructure (Q-bank). Q-bank was launched in 2010 and further developed in the framework of the EU funded project QBOL. The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs financed this project from 2011 to 2018.
From Q-bank to EPPO-Q-bank
The possible maintenance of Q-bank within EPPO was discussed for several years and in September 2018, the EPPO Council agreed that the database should be transferred to EPPO. Data from the original Q-bank database has now been transferred to the new EPPO Q-bank database, and during the course of 2019 and 2020, further work was conducted to harmonize the content and structure of the data among disciplines.
Content of EPPO-Q-bank
Priorities for integration of data from Q-bank were determined by diagnosticians working in plant pest diagnostic laboratories from the EPPO region and are as follows:
- DNA sequences for blasting: Please login to have access to sequences
- Protocols for barcoding and
- Where to find biological material
Many of the functionalities of the Q-bank database have been maintained including:
- - Descriptions of well characterized regulated plants pests with information linked to the EPPO Global Database.
- - Genomic sequence data, most of them being of specimens that are available in physical collections of plant pathogenic bacteria, fungi, insects, nematodes, phytoplasmas, viruses and viroids, and invasive plants.
We count on you to help us enrich the database
You can contribute by providing sequences, feedbacks on the use of the database or by becoming a curator. More information here.