The preservation of plant biodiversity is the task of the roughly 1,750 gene banks distributed around the world. They store plant samples and sometimes additional phenotypic or genetic information of around 7.4 million accessions of plant species in total. It is expected that with facilitated access to improved, quicker and cheaper sequencing and other omics technologies, the number of well-characterised accessions and the amount of detailed information that needs to be stored along with the biological material will grow rapidly and continuously. A team of scientists from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben has now looked ahead into the upcoming challenges and possibilities of the future of gene banks by publishing a perspective paper in Nature Genetics.
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Source: Phys.org