The 2009 ASHS Annual Conference

Objective(s):
To expose plant breeders to the wealth of information pertaining to germplasm that can be found locked away in herbaria and botanical reference collections. The workshop will be held at the Missouir Botanic Garden, hosted by herbarium and library staff. Tours of the herbarium and rare books will expose researchers to information that can be gleaned from combining herbarium specimen labels with historic texts and the resulting taxonomic and geographical data that affect plant breeder's use of germplasm.

Plant breeders utilize many sources of germplasm for inclusion to their programs, from publicly funded germplasm repositories and botanical collections to commercial nurseries and private collectors, encompassing cultivated and wild collected material.  But where do breeders turn, when the germplasm trail turns cold?  When the cultivated material is inadequate and wild-type material not known?  While herbaria and botanical reference collections are well used by taxonomists and historians, they are often overlooked by plant breeders as a source of information on germplasm for their programs.  The Missouri Botanic Garden herbarium has 5.2 million specimens (world’s sixth largest) and has an active research program encompassing floristic studies for much of the tropical world and parts of the temperate world, coordinating the Flora of North America project and the English translation of the Flora of China, and maintaining numerous databases pertaining to plant taxonomy.  The library contains over 160,000 volumes, including 9,000 rare books by the likes of Linnaeus, Michaux, Nuttall, Darwin, Banks, and many other botanical pioneers and explorers.  We will use modern germplasm collection issues to illustrate the usefulness of these collections in solving current taxonomic and germplasm identification problems in attendee’s breeding programs.  Details on meeting location and transport to the botanic garden will be announced during the conference.