NGS-Enabled Curation of Plant Gene Banks

Gene banks serve as frontline repositories for safeguarding diverse plant genetic resources, including wild relatives, landraces, traditional varieties, improved cultivars, and breeding materials, especially under the pressures of global climate change. Their curators play a crucial role in collecting, preserving, and documenting germplasm to maintain biodiversity and prevent the erosion of genetic resources, thereby contributing to food and nutritional security for present and future generations. Conventionally, phenotypic descriptors and molecular markers have been widely employed for germplasm curation and characterisation. However, these approaches are often resource-intensive, time-consuming, less accurate, and prone to environmental influence and human error. In the era of Digital Sequence Information (DSI) and next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, gene bank management has become more efficient, precise, and data-driven. Approaches such as genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) and whole-genome resequencing (WGrS) are increasingly adopted to develop a genomics-based framework for germplasm management due to their reliability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and ability to deliver high-resolution genetic characterisation of accessions. These strategies generate refined datasets of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers for downstream population genomic analyses to elucidate the genetic architecture of accessions. Population genomic studies reveal patterns of genetic diversity, population structure, and evolutionary relationships among indigenous and exotic germplasm conserved in gene banks. Genetic relatedness and ancestral relationships can further be examined through kinship, identity-by-state (IBS), and identity-by-descent (IBD) analyses, enabling the detection of mislabeled or duplicated accessions. Moreover, SNP markers with high polymorphism information content (PIC) and minor allele frequency (e.g., MAF ≥ 0.3) provide high-resolution DNA fingerprints for each accession, forming a robust framework for unique germplasm identification, accession tracking, and rationalised breeding strategies. Collectively, this study shows that genomics-assisted curation offers a powerful pathway toward rapid, accurate, and cost-effective gene bank management. This approach facilitates large-scale assessment of genetic diversity, precise identification of unique accessions, and effective utilisation of genetic resources in breeding programs – supporting the “Five Betters”: better gene bank management, better production, better biodiversity, better environment, and better nutrition for sustainable agriculture and global food security.