Historical phenotypic data from seven decades of seed regeneration in a wheat ex situ collection.

Abstract

Genebanks are valuable sources of genetic diversity, which can help to cope with future problems of global food security caused by a continuously growing population, stagnating yields and climate change. However, the scarcity of phenotypic and genotypic characterization of genebank accessions severely restricts their use in plant breeding. To warrant the seed integrity of individual accessions during periodical regeneration cycles in the field phenotypic characterizations are performed. This study provides non-orthogonal historical data of 12,754 spring and winter wheat accessions characterized for flowering time, plant height, and thousand grain weight during 70 years of seed regeneration at the German genebank. Supported by historical weather observations outliers were removed following a previously described quality assessment pipeline. In this way, ready-to-use processed phenotypic data across regeneration years were generated and further validated. We encourage international and national genebanks to increase their efforts to transform into bio-digital resource centers. A first important step could consist in unlocking their historical data treasures that allows an educated choice of accessions by scientists and breeders.

Plant phenotyping relevance

7 दशकにわたるコムギ表現型データを大規模に整理・品質評価・検証し、再利用可能な処理済みデータとして提供することが中心であり、植物フェノタイピングデータセットとして適格です。

Code and data availability

The paper deposits its historical wheat phenotypic data (FT, PH, TGW for 12,754 accessions), outlier-corrected and BLUE-processed datasets, and example R analysis scripts in the e!DAL-PGP repository under DOI 10.5447/IPK/2019/11, which is an allowed URL and appears verbatim in the text.