National BioResource Project-Wheat, Japan: An ex situ Conservation of Genetic Diversity of Wheat

The National Bioresource Project-Wheat (NBRP-Wheat), launched by the Japanese government in 2002, is aimed to maintain and distribute seed stocks and DNA clones of wheat. Here we present an overview of our activities in NBRP-Wheat, Japan. Additionally to its primary roles in collecting, maintaining, and distributing valuable seed stocks and DNA clones, the second-term NBRP-Wheat (2007-2011) featured the collection and characterization of DNA markers. The objectives of the DNA marker project were; (1) to make the resources of the NBRP-Wheat more valuable for molecular studies by addition of genotype information, and (2) to find a set of DNA markers that is suitable for detecting polymorphisms among wheat samples. In five years, we obtained PCR amplification profiles of the 1,355 SSR markers (233 gwm, 123 barc, 185 cfa & cfd, 21 gdm, 544 wmc, and 249 hbg, hbe, & hbd markers) for 48 accessions of hexaploid wheat and relatives. We could also establish a set of 210 SSR markers (10 markers per chromosome) suitable for polymorphism survey in hexaploid wheat. The data is open to public (http://www.shigen.nig.ac.jp/wheat/komugi/) and being used in various research projects. The objective of the third term NBRP-Wheat (2012-2016) is to provide wheat resources with ‘high information content’ and ‘high reliability’. To achieve this objective, we have started to establish core-collections of hexaploid, tetraploid and diploid wheat species by genotyping, and to add phenotypic data to those core-collections. (This work has been supported by the National Bioresource Project, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan.)