The college of agricultural engineering sciences at the University of Baghdad has recently established the 1st gene – bank for Iraqi varieties at the Date Palm Research Unit by identifying the genetic fingerprint of more than 120 famous palm varieties, such as al-Barhi, Wasta Omran, Maktoum, Al-Tabarzal and other varieties in the first phase.
The emphasis was given to the samples taken from its original locations at the ministry of agriculture’ stations in all provinces of Iraq. It is worth mentioned that the establishment of this bank is the first step in a wide project to build a genetic map of Iraqi date palm varieties as well as extracting the DNA for the second phase which includes 100 famous varieties of Iraqi dates.