Preservation of seed viability during 25 years of storage under standard genebank conditions

Maintaining sufficient viability is critical to the sustainability of ex situ conserved seed collections. For this reason, accessions are regenerated when viability falls below a predefined threshold. Viability is monitored by determining the germination ability of accessions at predefined time inte...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Genetic resources and crop evolution 2013-04, Vol.60 (4), p.1407-1421
Main Authors: van Treuren, R, de Groot, E. C, van Hintum, Th. J. L
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aging
Agriculture
Aluminum
aluminum foil
bags
Biomedical and Life Sciences
brassicaceae
Data collection
desiccation-tolerance
Dormancy
Genetic resources
Germination
Life Sciences
longevity
maturity
Metal foils
Moisture content
Monitoring
Plant Genetics and Genomics
Plant Physiology
Plant Sciences
Plant Systematics/Taxonomy/Biogeography
Preservation
Regeneration
Research Article
Seeds
Storage conditions
Vacuum
Viability
wastes
Water content
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Maintaining sufficient viability is critical to the sustainability of ex situ conserved seed collections. For this reason, accessions are regenerated when viability falls below a predefined threshold. Viability is monitored by determining the germination ability of accessions at predefined time intervals. Optimizing the frequency of these germination tests, in order to avoid waste of resources, is hampered by the scarce availability of data about seed longevity, particularly for material maintained under genebank conditions. Here we report on the analysis of nearly 40,000 germination test results collected for a wide range of crop species over a 25-years period by the centre for genetic resources, the Netherlands (CGN), where seeds of genebank accessions are dried to 3–7 % moisture content and stored for the long term under near-vacuum in aluminium foil bags at −20 °C. The results indicate that seed viability is well maintained for the large majority of seed lots during the first 25 years after regeneration as only 3.3 % of the monitoring tests revealed below-threshold germination values. It is argued that the majority of these sub-standard seed lots are due to other causes than seed ageing, including dormancy problems and estimation error in germination testing. For material, maintained under the seed management procedures and storage conditions practiced by CGN, it is therefore recommended to delay the first germination monitoring tests to 25 years after regeneration.
ISSN:0925-9864
1573-5109
DOI:10.1007/s10722-012-9929-0