The John Innes Centre Germplasm Resources Unit located in the

Norwich Research Park Norwich Research Park is a business community located to the southwest of Norwich, Norfolk, in East Anglia, England close to the A11 road (England), A11 and the A47 road, A47 roads. Set in over 230 hectares of parkland, Norwich Research Park i ...

Norwich Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with ...

, England, is a

Germplasm Germplasm are living genetic resources such as seeds or tissues that are maintained for the purpose of animal and plant breeding, preservation, and other research uses. These resources may take the form of seed collections stored in seed banks, tr ...

conservation unit and National Capability supported by the

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, is a non-departmental public body (NDPB), and is the largest UK public funder of non-medical bioscience. It predominantly funds scientific rese ...

. The unit houses a number of internationally recognised reference and working collections for wheat, oats, barley and peas, which serves UK and non-UK based academic, industrial and non-industrial groups.

History

The collections from the Germplasm Resources Unit were brought together in the mid-1980s from working collection from several research institutes from around the UK that worked with small grain cereals and legumes, including the extinct Plant Breeding Institute. This centralisation effort was supported by the John Innes Institute, and was designed to act as an open collection that would provide access to important resources for ongoing research and breeding. The connection of the unit and the

John Innes Centre The John Innes Centre (JIC), located in Norwich, Norfolk, England, is an independent centre for research and training in plant and microbial science founded in 1910. It is a registered charity (No 223852) grant-aided by the Biotechnology and B ...

has the advantage of placing germplasm material on sites of active research where a higher level of interaction with the scientific community is possible. This two-way interaction ensures that scientists and students are exposed to, and have greater opportunities to view and discuss genetic variability, while affording staff involvement in research objectives and priorities within both basic and strategic applied science. In 2012 the unit became a National Capability supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council as part of its new funding arrangements. Today, the cereal collections have been successfully screened for many traits leading to the identification of new sources of disease resistance to a range of diseases as well as tolerance to drought, salinity and aluminium.

Collections

The Germplasm Resources Unit houses a diverse range of seed collections, accounting for more than 20,000 accessions. The seeds are stored in a special low temperature, low humidity facility and a complete list of accessions can be found in the SeedStor, the unit's database, which was released at the end of 2014. The oldest collection kept in unit is the Watkins Landrace Wheat Collection, which has a variety of wheat

landraces A landrace is a domesticated, locally adapted, often traditional variety of a species of animal or plant that has developed over time, through adaptation to its natural and cultural environment of agriculture and pastoralism, and due to isolation ...

cultivars acquired by A.E. Watkins in the 1930s from 32 different countries in Asia, Europe and Africa. Because the samples were collected before modern

plant breeding Plant breeding is the science of changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics. It has been used to improve the quality of nutrition in products for humans and animals. The goals of plant breeding are to produce cro ...

efforts and the

green revolution The Green Revolution, also known as the Third Agricultural Revolution, was a period of technology transfer initiatives that saw greatly increased crop yields and agricultural production. These changes in agriculture began in developed countrie ...

, it is a very interesting source of genetic variability for novel agronomic trait discovery. The collection was screened in 2014 by

researchers, and a great level of genetic diversity was found. The Small Grain Cereal Collection is the largest in the UK and originated from a series of working collections from different plant breeding and research institutes from the UK. The collection was produced alongside public sector breeding programmes, and has the potential to be a source of important traits regarding disease, pest and stress resistance. The Germplasm Resources Unit also houses a

Pisum ''Pisum'' is a genus of flowering plants in the family Fabaceae, native to southwest Asia and northeast Africa. It contains one to five species, depending on taxonomic interpretation; the International Legume Database (ILDIS) accepts three speci ...

collection, all of the elite varieties that are registered in the UK National Listing, and several specialist genetic collections, such as near-isogenic lines, TILLING collections, precise genetic stocks, mapping populations, host differentials for disease testing and variant collections developed and targeted at the research and breeding communities.

References

{{authority control Agricultural research institutes in the United Kingdom Botanical research institutes Genetics in the United Kingdom Norwich Plant genetics Research institutes in Norfolk