National Database System of Crop Germplasm Resources in China

The germplasm collection began in the 1950s in China, and now a total of 300,000 accessions have been collected. From 1979 to 1990,the large-scale expeditions were made on the crop germplasm resources in Yunnan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Jiangxi, Tibet, Shennongjia and Hainan Island, obtaining a lot of germplasm resources which were on the brink of extinction, including landraces, rare species, wild species and weed species. In the meantime, 141 kinds of crops with 270,000 accessions were identified for agronomical and morphological characters, in which 150,000 accessions were evaluated in quality, stress tolerance, disease and pest resistance. Evaluation and identification were made on the base of standardized unified methods by 2560 technical personnel in over 400 agricultural institutions all over the country. All the data of evaluation were provided to the National Database System of Crop Germplasm Resources (NDSCGR). The NDSCGR is a central repository for all types of plant genetic resources information. It consists of three sub-systems: the management database system of National Crop Gene Bank (NCGB), the characterization and evaluation database system and the database system for germplasm exchange at home and abroad. When we design the system, considering the great differences in crop description and evaluation information, thus we set up a control software layer in order to manage 141 kinds of crops with the unified methods. At present, there are 141 kinds of crops with 270,000 accessions of information for germplasm, over 12 million data items and 440 megabytes stored in NDSCGR. The NDSCGR has the functions of pedigree tracing, graphical analysis, statistical analysis and classification of multiple fields besides data input, maintenance, retrieval and printing. It can rapidly and correctly provide needed standardized information for breeder and technical personnel of biotechnology.