Abstract
Genebanks are valuable sources of genetic diversity, which can help to cope with future problems of global food security caused by a continuously growing population, stagnating yields and climate change. However, the scarcity of phenotypic and genotypic characterization of genebank accessions severely restricts their use in plant breeding. To warrant the seed integrity of individual accessions during periodical regeneration cycles in the field phenotypic characterizations are performed. This study provides non-orthogonal historical data of 12,754 spring and winter wheat accessions characterized for flowering time, plant height, and thousand grain weight during 70 years of seed regeneration at the German genebank. Supported by historical weather observations outliers were removed following a previously described quality assessment pipeline. In this way, ready-to-use processed phenotypic data across regeneration years were generated and further validated. We encourage international and national genebanks to increase their efforts to transform into bio-digital resource centers. A first important step could consist in unlocking their historical data treasures that allows an educated choice of accessions by scientists and breeders.
Highlights
Background & SummaryThe global cereal production amounted to 2.65 billion tons during the 2016–2017 growing season, with maize, wheat, and rice being the most relevant crops, accounting for 41.16%, 28.55%, and 19.04%, respectively[1]
In some important wheat growing regions of Europe the yield progress is even stagnated since almost 20 years[4]
In order to adapt wheat to these future demands, the use of genetic variation harbored within plant genetic resource collections has been frequently suggested[6,7,8]
Summary
The global cereal production amounted to 2.65 billion tons during the 2016–2017 growing season, with maize, wheat, and rice being the most relevant crops, accounting for 41.16%, 28.55%, and 19.04%, respectively[1]. The Federal ex situ Genebank of Agricultural and Horticultural Crops hosted by the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben (Germany) ranks among the ten largest collections worldwide[11] Put into numbers, this collection preserves ~151.000 accessions that comprise ~3.000 plant species of 756 genera[12]. The regeneration process is accompanied by routine phenotypic characterizations, which are required to preserve the seed integrity across regeneration cycles[13] Harnessing this historical phenotypic data for breeding and research is challenging and several strategies have been described for analyzing and validating such non-orthogonal datasets[12,14,15]. With the attached simplified software scripts for outlier correction and estimation of BLUEs, we want to encourage other genebanks to take advantage of their historical data treasures across crops and traits
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