Systematic collection, comprehensive study, safe conservation, and sustainable use of grain crop genetic resources: 130 years of experience at VIR

The Bureau of Applied Botany was organized in 1894 under the Scientific Committee of the Ministry of Agriculture and State Property of the Russian Empire. In 1900, with R. E. Regel joining the Bureau, collections and evaluation of the Russian diversity of barley varieties began, and in 1905, when Regel was elected Head of the Bureau, this activity acquires a systematic character. In 1920, when N. I. Vavilov came to work at the Department of Applied Botany, all its activities were raised to a higher level. He organized famous explorations on five continents, significantly expanded the network of experiment stations and experiment sites for the evaluation and regeneration of the collected material, and set up a basis for the use of this material in breeding practice. All the work acquired a systematic character and employed uniform methodological approaches. All collection activities and evaluation of the collected material were supported by the development of Vavilov’s concepts published in monographs, collections of articles, and Soviet and foreign journals. The main goal of the work carried out at the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry was aimed at breeding new productive varieties of agricultural crops, which, according to Vavilov, occupied over 2 mln ha of crop areas in the USSR.
In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Vavilov’s ideas, his theoretical concepts and the activities of VIR played an important role in the organization and development of genebanks in Europe, as well as in the activities of FAO, IPGRI and other international organizations. Subsequently, not only Soviet, but also numerous foreign collecting missions followed the routes outlined by Vavilov to collect the initial material for breeding. From 1946 to 2023, VIR specialists conducted more than 1,000 collecting missions to various parts of the USSR, CIS, and Russia, and over 120 ones across five continents of the world to collect genetic diversity. All the collected material was comprehensively evaluated and propagated in the network of VIR experiment stations.
VIR took an active part in the creation of International Descriptors of COMECON countries for many agricultural crops, which formed the basis for the creation of the Multicrop Descriptor Lists under the guidance of IPGRI. Great attention has always been paid to the safe preservation of the VIR global collection, therefore a seed storage facility with three underground floors of storage space was built in 1976 at the Kuban Experiment Station of VIR. Currently, the Institute employs facilities for seed storage at +4°C, –10°C, and –20°C, as well as a cryogenic storage facility. Today, the VIR global collection contains more than 320,000 accessions of cultivated plants and their wild relatives, belonging to more than 2,500 botanical varieties, more than 2,1690 species, 376 genera, and 64 families. The VIR herbarium collection contains over 250,000 herbarium sheets collected in various regions of Russia and countries of the world.
The history of controlled preservation of collection accessions in the world numbers no more than 70 years. Currently, many researchers are curious whether plant germplasm accessions preserved in a genebank change genetically over time. There are 2,000 genebanks in the world that preserve over 7.4 million accessions of plant germplasm of more than 16,500 species, and about two million accessions (27%) are considered unique. The work of genebanks at the national and international level is influenced by the adequacy of funding and other external factors that often affect the safety of specific accessions of the collection. In addition, an accession under the long-term storage is affected by internal genetic (evolutionary) factors that must be taken into account in the work of a genebank. An accession entering the genebank should be regenerated and multiplied, and already at this stage the accession can have an altered genetic profile compared to that of the initial (original) specimen, since it can be affected by four evolutionary factors: selection, mutation, genetic drift and gene flow, acting in different preservation conditions of a genebank.
VIR reliably preserves the identity of collection accessions based on morphological (intraspecific systematic) features, which were and remain the basic tool in the work of the plant genetic resources departments. At the same time, taking into account the impact of evolutionary (genetic) factors in genebank operations will improve the development of effective working procedures and will benefit the long-term conservation of collection accessions. The problems of artificial selection, point mutations, genetic drift and gene flow in different plant species are likely to become central to the effective conservation of the unique accessions of the VIR global collection. At present, the activities of VIR as the National Center for Plant Genetic Resources, and the development of related legislative framework in Russia facilitate finding an effective solution to new challenges in the spheres of systematic collection, comprehensive evaluation, safe conservation, and sustainable use of plant genetic resources in the Russian Federation at a new level.

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