This is a major milestone in ARCAD development. The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) (in French : FEDER) granted € 3.5 million to develop ARCAD technological facilities. ARCAD consortium members (Cirad, Inra, Ird and Montpellier SupAgro) will contribute to this operation to the tune of € 1.6 million. The funding will support the purchase and setting up of equipments for seed conservation, seed phenotyping, cryopreservation, DNA extraction and banking, genotyping/sequencing as well as the development of an information system for biological resources management and the web portal to access information on collections. These technological platforms will first be set up in existing facilities and will then move into a new building by 2016.