Can your genebank go MUSTY?

A really interesting recent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast altered me to the fact that libraries occasionally get rid of books, something they call “weeding.” Now, genebanks are often compared to libraries, so I was interested to learn about the criteria librarians use in deciding what to weed. It turns out one popular — though not necessarily easy to follow — set of rules goes under the totally appropriate acronym of MUSTY:

M – Misleading, inaccurate, out of date. Unless you’re an official depository for books containing scientific theories that have since been disproved, don’t feel guilty about discarding books about NASA from 1975.

U – Ugly. Books ought to be beautiful, if at all possible. Books that are attractive will appeal to readers.

S – Superseded. If a better book comes along, don’t feel obligated to keep a former edition or favorite unless you are sure it has lingering value.

T – Trivial. People know I like books, and with the best of intentions they sometimes give me volumes that I really have no use for. Remember their thoughtfulness, thank them sincerely, but find a better home for those books – you will all be better off.

Y – Your collection: This book is no longer appropriate for your current passion. If you are finished learning everything there is to know about raising orchids and have moved on to quilting, donate the orchid books to a local club who can use them before they grow misleading, inaccurate and out of date for anyone else. Consider whether you have read it already and intend to do so again; or, if you haven’t read it, will you? Really and honestly?

So if a genebank found itself having to “weed” its collection, would any of these tests help at all? How does the genebank-as-library metaphor stand up to stress-testing?

Not hugely well, it seems to me.

Start with M. It’s hard to see how to apply this to germplasm. An accession might have inaccurate data associated with it, but nobody would get rid of it for that reason. It might be out of date in the sense of running down in viability, but that’s a reason for regenerating it, not binning it.

As for U, I guess this could refer to an accession that has been evaluated for certain traits and found wanting. But you never know what will happen with the next trait you evaluate for. And standards of beauty change.

Can a genebank accession be S for superseded? ¹ This might be trickier. Do you need to keep a really old batch of seeds after regeneration, say? But I don’t think you can really easily apply the concept at the accession level.

But maybe you can so apply T. Think of a plant originally collected as a potential forage that turns out not to be useful in that capacity at all. Does it still need to be part of a forage collection?

And that might also go for Y. Some genebanks do have themes: medicinals, forages, biosaline agriculture… If the mandate of the genebank changes, some stuff may need to find other homes.

MUSTY is not the only way that librarians use to guide their weeding. But to the extent that it is, it does not look like it translates to genebanks as easily as the prevalence of the metaphor might lead us to suppose.