Abstract

Genebanks are an important source of genetic diversity for food crops worldwide. They are systematically assembled and maintained and offer valuable information for use by plant breeders to improve agricultural productivity and nutritional quality. Challenges faced by genebanks include providing sufficient and accurate trait information to facilitate searching the collection, controlling redundant accessions, seed mixtures, misidentified accessions, and genetic gaps, as well as lack of resources to thoroughly characterize collections. The National Small Grains Collection (NSGC) was established to house all small grain crops including rice, wheat, oat, barley, rye, and triticale. The NSGC maintains 19, 132 rice accessions, and the Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center maintains approximately 38,000 rice accessions through the Genetic Stocks Oryza (GSOR) collection.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Trevis D. Huggins is a Research Geneticist at the USDA-ARS Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center in Stuttgart, Arkansas. Dr. Huggins received his Ph.D. in Molecular and Environmental Plant Science with a focus on Plant Breeding and Molecular Genetics from Texas A&M University. He completed his postdoctoral training at Texas A&M University (specialty plant breeding) and Dale Bumper National Rice Research Center (bioinformatics). His group is focused on rejuvenation, phenotypic and genotypic characterization, reducing redundancy, and filling genetic gaps in the rice germplasm collection. We also seek to identify accessions that possess traits that are useful to the US rice breeding community. We also aim to incorporate high throughput phenotyping technology such as UAV in the program.