Talk:Germplasm

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Discussion for: Germplasm • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Germplasm covers germplasm as the material itself: what it is, the forms in which it is kept (seed, live plants, tissue in culture, frozen tissue and pollen), the accession and its passport data, how cannabis germplasm is stored and regrown, the cannabis collections described in print, how drug-control law and the plant treaty bear on its exchange, and why landrace germplasm is sought. The facility, its operations and its storage standards belong to Gene bank; conservation away from the place of origin as a strategy, set against conservation in the field, to Ex situ conservation; the measurement of variation within and between populations to Genetic diversity; the seed lots of each accession to Help:Seed lots.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

• FAO, Genebank Standards for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (revised edition, 2014), glossary, pp. 162–165: the definitions of germplasm, accession, passport data, landrace, orthodox seed, regeneration, long-term conservation, ex situ conservation, in vitro culture and cryopreservation, and the note that stored pollen needs a crossing partner.
• International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (FAO), Article 2, p. 3: the definitions of "genetic material" and "plant genetic resources for food and agriculture"; Annex I, pp. 46–49: the crops and forages of the multilateral system, among which no Cannabis appears.
• Clarke (1998), Journal of the International Hemp Association 5: 75–79: the Vavilov Institute's cannabis accessions by country of origin.
• Welling and colleagues (2016), Frontiers in Plant Science 7: 1113: the effect of the drug conventions on cannabis collections; the North American losses (citing Small and Marcus 2002); the published collections and their sizes (CPRO, the Vavilov Institute, the Polish and Yunnan collections, Ecofibre); passport data; seed storage; the difficulties of regrowing; seed freezing; the proposed virtual core collection of up to 400 accessions; the barriers to a physical one; East Asia as a priority.
• McPartland and Small (2020), PhytoKeys 144: 81–112: the four taxa described as critically endangered reservoirs of germplasm; hybridisation of Central and South Asian landraces; the call for collection in the centres of diversity and for seed banks as an immediate priority.
• Uchendu and colleagues (2019), Medical Cannabis and Cannabinoids 2: 29–34: the freezing of shoot tips of three cannabis cultivars and their regrowth.
• Bachir and colleagues (2022), Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research 7: 603–615: the introduction of Central Asian genetics into Moroccan cannabis in 1980 and the state of the narrow-leaflet landrace.
• The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961, articles 1 and 28: the definition of cannabis and the exclusion of seed, and cultivation for fibre, seed or horticulture.
• GRIN-Global entries for PI 5021, G 33598 and G 33685; the Genesys and GBIF entries for IPK CAN 20 and CAN 22; the USDA-ARS page on the hemp collection at Geneva, New York.

Seed under the drug conventions

The Single Convention leaves cannabis seed out of its definition of cannabis. Welling and colleagues nonetheless name limits on the import, export and transfer of seed between parties to the 1961 and 1971 conventions as a barrier to a shared cannabis collection, citing two 2015 papers.

The size of the Vavilov Institute collection in 1998

Welling and colleagues (2016), citing Clarke (1998), give the origins of 493 accessions. Clarke's own table of accessions by country of origin totals 496.

Terms

• Germplasm and genetic material: the FAO standards define germplasm by heredity; the plant treaty defines genetic material as plant material "containing functional units of heredity".
• Accession in the gene bank sense is a stored sample under its own number. Help:Accessions covers the wider sense, which takes in herbarium sheets and field observations that hold no living germplasm.
• Gene bank is written as two words; FAO writes "genebank".

Share of cannabis germplasm held as seed

Welling and colleagues (2016) discuss the storage and regrowing of cannabis seed and give no share of accessions by form of storage. For all crops together, Engels and Ebert (2021) write that 96 per cent of accessions are kept as seed in cold storage. The University of Mississippi keeps cannabis as living plants (Uchendu and colleagues 2019).