SeedStor: A Germplasm Information Management System and Public Database

SeedStor (https://www.seedstor.ac.uk) acts as the publicly available database for the seed collections held by the Germplasm Resources Unit (GRU) based at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK. The GRU is a national capability supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). The GRU curates germplasm collections of a range of temperate cereal, legume and Brassica crops and their associated wild relatives, as well as precise genetic stocks, near-isogenic lines and mapping populations. With >35,000 accessions, the GRU forms part of the UK’s plant conservation contribution to the Multilateral System (MLS) of the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) for wheat, barley, oat and pea. SeedStor is a fully searchable system that allows our various collections to be browsed species by species through to complicated multipart phenotype criteria-driven queries. The results from these searches can be downloaded for later analysis or used to order germplasm via our shopping cart. The user community for SeedStor is the plant science research community, plant breeders, specialist growers, hobby farmers and amateur gardeners, and educationalists. Furthermore, SeedStor is much more than a database; it has been developed to act internally as a Germplasm Information Management System that allows team members to track and process germplasm requests, determine regeneration priorities, handle cost recovery and Material Transfer Agreement paperwork, manage the Seed Store holdings and easily report on a wide range of the aforementioned tasks.