The German Federal Ex Situ Genebank for Agricultural and Horticultural Crops : conservation, exploitation and steps towards a bio-digital resource centre

Over more than 80 years, the collections of the German Federal Ex Situ Genebank for Agricultural and Horticultural Crops have grown to around 152,000 accessions of 3,000 species preserved at three locations: Gatersleben, Groß Lüsewitz and Malchow/Poel. More than 96% of the material is stored as desiccation-tolerant orthodox seeds according to the active–base–safety (A-B-S) replicate approach at -18°C. Almost 70,000 freshly regenerated safety replicates are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. However, 4% of the material (2,000 field, 3,000 in vitro and 2,500 cryopreserved accessions) can only be maintained vegetatively, as no or few seeds or no true-breeding seeds are available. Most of the accessions are provided via the standard material transfer agreement (SMTA) and more than 1.2 million samples have been distributed since the genebank was founded. To guarantee the identity of the living plant material, reference samples comprising about 450,000 voucher specimens, 110,000 seed and fruit samples and 57,000 cereal spikes are used for comparisons. Genebank workflows are supported by the Genebank Information System (GBIS), which also manages workflow-independent data to describe the genebank accessions by passport, phenotypic and taxonomic data, thus allowing users to make targeted selections of material. The genebank-related processes, including acquisition, preservation, regeneration, documentation and material distribution, are certified for quality management in accordance with ISO 9001. Nowadays, the genebank is undergoing a transformation process to become a bio-digital resource centre to improve utilization of the genetic resources in research and breeding to address future challenges.