SeedStor: A Germplasm Information Management System and Public Database.

Rsp Horler,As Turner,M Ambrose,P Fretter

doi:10.1093/pcp/pcx195

Abstract

SeedStor (https://www.seedstor.ac.uk) acts as the publicly available database for the seed collections held by the Germplasm Resources Unit (GRU) based at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK. The GRU is a national capability supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). The GRU curates germplasm collections of a range of temperate cereal, legume and Brassica crops and their associated wild relatives, as well as precise genetic stocks, near-isogenic lines and mapping populations. With >35,000 accessions, the GRU forms part of the UK’s plant conservation contribution to the Multilateral System (MLS) of the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) for wheat, barley, oat and pea. SeedStor is a fully searchable system that allows our various collections to be browsed species by species through to complicated multipart phenotype criteria-driven queries. The results from these searches can be downloaded for later analysis or used to order germplasm via our shopping cart. The user community for SeedStor is the plant science research community, plant breeders, specialist growers, hobby farmers and amateur gardeners, and educationalists. Furthermore, SeedStor is much more than a database; it has been developed to act internally as a Germplasm Information Management System that allows team members to track and process germplasm requests, determine regeneration priorities, handle cost recovery and Material Transfer Agreement paperwork, manage the Seed Store holdings and easily report on a wide range of the aforementioned tasks.

Highlights

Ready and reliable access to well-curated diverse germplasm resources is essential to underpinning advances in understanding plant sciences and providing the source of novel and adaptive traits for crop improvement
The Germplasm Resources Unit (GRU) has transcribed data from paper to electronic documents; and from spreadsheets to multi-user databases. This most recent transition to a single MySQL database has required a large investment of time in curating data, cross-checking and identifying discrepancies, and in part explains the time required to bring all of the metadata for material currently held by the GRU into SeedStor to make them publicly available
We have provided some training resources and have run training sessions during a number of events hosted by the John Innes Centre (JIC), for example the Wisp Course on Wheat Genetics, 2015

Summary

Introduction

Ready and reliable access to well-curated diverse germplasm resources is essential to underpinning advances in understanding plant sciences and providing the source of novel and adaptive traits for crop improvement. The main functionality of SeedStor from the external user perspective is provided by the ability to search across our publicly available collections for materials that may be of interest and place an order. This search allows further filtering of collections based on taxonomy, sowing season and country of origin as well as to sort the resulting accessions by the same criteria (Fig. 1B).

Results

Conclusion