National Natural History Collection of Seeds and Fruits at Bar-Ilan University

The Israel National Collection of Seeds and Fruits is the heart of the lab. Prof. Ehud Weiss is the curator of the collection. The director of the collection is Dr. Yoel Melamed, who has been collecting, identifying, and enlarging the collection significantly since the early 1990s.

The collection includes over 10,000 samples of seeds and fruits and other plant parts from around the Middle East: Israel and all its neighbors, Iran, Greece, Turkey, Georgia, Cyprus, and other countries.

The collection was established by Prof. Mordechai Kislev in 1973. Since then, the laboratory team has been collecting seeds and fruits, which are botanically identified and added to the collection. The collection is used for morphological-formal identification of seed and fruit remains found in archaeological excavations and for studies on the taxonomy of inter- and intra-species variations. The collection includes, inter alia, samples from the beginning of the scientific collection of Flora Palaestina (Israel-Jordan) as well as the surrounding countries, collected by Michael Zohary, Aaron Aaronsohn, Alexander Eig, Pierre Edmond Boissier, John Edward Dinsmore, Otto Warburg, Peter Davis, Paul Ascherson, and more. The collection also includes the private collection of wheat cultivars collected by Dr. Ludwig Pinner.

In the collection you can find samples of seeds of the same species from a variety of habitats and geographical districts. Efforts are currently being made to ensure that the collection includes at least three specimens of each species, and sometimes of each sub-species or variety. In light of its scientific importance, the collection was defined in 2008 by the PTA as a national collection.