Home Forum topic Conventional Seed Banking Best practices question for small collection

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  • #17957
    Emily ReesCPC Conservation Officer

    We have a NM state listed species that was collected at a relatively small scale but otherwise suitable for conventional banking. The collection is ~40 maternal lines.  No maternal line seems to have more than 20 seeds but the total collection count should be around 400. I was curious what the best practices were for splitting samples or if they should be split at all since maternal line counts are small? The plan is to collect again in the next few years but should we also try to increase seed in the meantime?

    #17961
    Katie HeinemanCPC Conservation Officer

    Hi Emily! If you do have capacity for grow out, this accession would be a good candidate for seed increase because there are a good number of maternal plants, so you would be presumably amplifying a collection with a reasonable amount of genetic diversity. If you do use seeds for grow out, I would still keep 5-10 seeds per wild collected maternal line as a long term accession (unduplicated). If all goes well, you can bank and safety duplicate the F1 accession.

    If you don’t have capacity for seed increase, I would safety duplicate this accession. The CPC Best Practices technically recommend in this case that you would not subdivide the within maternal lines with fewer than 20 seeds (you would just delegate an half of the maternal lines each of the long term groups). Some partners disagree with this approach and would rather the subdivided all maternal lines so the entire complement of genetic diversity is represented in both places. I think both approaches have pluses and minuses – but I think the bottom line is that the material is duplicated 🙂

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