Format: ORAL

Marlien van der Merwe, Saphira Bloom-Quinn, Patricia Lu-Irving, Jason Bragg, Eilish McMaster, Maurizio Rossetto

Research Centre for Ecosystem Resilience, Botanic Gardens of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Seed banking of wild plants is a cost-effective conservation tool that allows for genetically representative germplasm collections to be stored for extensive periods of time. Such collections are becoming increasingly more important particularly for species where anthropogenic activities are contributing towards local extinction and population decline, leading to a loss of genetic diversity and adaptive capacity. Seed collecting aimed at capturing genetic diversity across the range of wide-spread species can be daunting specially in parts of the world where resources are limited and such germplasm collections are only now being initiated. Here we use a range of genomic datasets to provide guidelines for building representative conservation germplasm collections. Progeny datasets for multiple species that we obtained from seed collected across multiple sites and multiple maternal lines allowed us to explore how different collecting strategies (numbers of seed, families and sites) capture genetic diversity. The results from this empirical data were encouraging indicating that a.) small quality collections can capture a large proportion of allelic variation and b.) we can use population genomic data to strategize seed collections to maximise genetic diversity. We apply the outcomes from the progeny analysis to multiple extensive population genomic datasets available through the Restore and Renew program and discuss guidelines for capturing various representative levels of allelic variation. Finally, based on these progeny data sets and other results from our teams extensive work in taxonomy, conservation and restoration genomics, we prompt seed collectors and seed bank managers to maintain maternal lines during the life of the collection as this maximises the value and utility of these precious germplasm collections.