Chapter 3 - Genetic resources: Collection, characterization, conservation, and documentation

Abstract

Globally, ex situ collections of small millets and pseudocereals are being preserved in more than 150 gene banks across the world, of which the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRSAT), India, Institute of Crop Germplasm Resources, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (ICGR-CAAS), Beijing, China, Plant Genetic Resources Conservation Unit, Southern Regional Plant Introduction Station, University of Georgia, USDA-ARS and National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, New Delhi, India are the major repositories. Germplasm diversity subsets such as core and minicore collections have been established in all the six small millets species. These small sized ‘international public goods’ have provided an entry point to the huge ex situ collections and being widely used for the identification of trait specific donors. However, such diversity subsets are not available for pseudocereals, thereby restricting the wide scale multilocational phenotyping of germplasm for complex quantitative traits. With the emerging genome sequence information, it is high time to resequence the germplasm collections including diversity panels to correlate the sequence variation with the phenotypic trait of interest. The current status of germplasm, its characterization, documentation, and impact on genetic improvement of small millets and pseudocereals has been summarized in this chapter.