An integrated approach to the registration and preservation of a cultivar gene pool in the VIR genebank exemplified in cultivars bred by the Ural Federal Agrarian Research Center of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract

As part of a comprehensive program for registering and preserving the gene pool of Russian varieties in the VIR genebank, initiated at the N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources, nomenclatural standards were assigned to potato cultivars ‘Alâska’, ‘Argo’, ‘Bravo’, ‘Irbitskij’, ‘Legenda’, ‘Lûks’, ‘Terra’, and ‘Šah’, and a voucher specimen was prepared for pre-cultivar ‘Bagira’. All of them were bred at the Ural Federal Agrarian Research Centre (Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences). Nomenclatural standards of these cultivars are preserved in the Nomenclatural standard collection at the Herbarium of cultivated plants and their wild relatives and weeds (VIR Herbarium, WIR). For each of them, a genetic passport was developed using DNA preparations isolated from plant material donated by the cultivar author to the VIR herbarium. The genetic passport, which includes information on the allelic composition of eight chromosome-specific microsatellite loci, is supplemented by the molecular screening data with markers of 11 R-genes for resistance to pests, as well as the data on the types of cytoplasm. The author of cultivars also supplied VIR with samples of virus-free in vitro plants. Microplants of eight Ural cultivars and one pre-cultivar were genotyped using the same SSR markers and included in the VIR in vitro collection, and then in the cryopreservation program. Most of the accessions were characterized by a relatively high, above 39%, level of post-cryogenic regeneration. Frozen explants of the genotyped Ural cultivars (‘Alâska’, ‘Argo’, ‘Legenda’, ‘Terra’, and ‘Šah’) and pre-cultivar ‘Bagira’ were placed for long-term storage in the VIR Cryobank.