Stig Blixt very quickly saw the importance of building and maintaining a base collection of pea germplasm and he must have been among the early leaders in using the power of a computer for storage and accessing of information on genetic stocks. With generous and strong support from the Weibull family and the head of the institute he was able to build on the Weibullsholm pea collection and develop an extensive computerised database on the traits and origin of each line. In the days of the Iron Curtain, we must rejoice that he was able to bridge the gap between East and West and during this time many valuable lines from both zones were added to the collection. In addition, his own work on mutagenesis added extensively to the range of germplasm available in the collection. Many of the lines added during this period continue to prove of immense value, for example in research studies using a mutant-based approach to understand the control of plant development.
Gene symbols tend to fall readily into disarray.
It dealt with key status issues such as valid, invalid, synonym and extinct, and stressed the importance of appointing and maintaining type lines and conducting allelism tests before publishing new symbols. Pea research ended at Weibullsholm in 1986 but by this time Stig had ensured the pea collection had been safely transferred to the Nordic Gene Bank at Alnarp. Subsequently, Stig joined the staff at the NGB first as Head of the Materials Department in 1988 and later as Director from 1990 until his retirement at the end of 1995. In the early 90 s the active pea collection was moved to the John Innes Institute, Norwich, under the care of the present PGA Symbols Coordinator and Germplasm Curator, Mike Ambrose. However, a base collection is still held in storage at the Nordic Gene Bank.