This section details the Plant Accessions from your chosen Collection (Watkins Historic Collection of Landrace Wheats) that are maintained by the GRU.

Collection Details:

Formally known as "Watkins Selections of Landrace Wheats" by the GRU, this is a collection of landrace wheat (durum and aestivum forms) from 32 countries around the world assembled in the late 1920s by A. E. Watkins in Cambridge. The collection initially consisted of several thousand accessions the majority of which were lost while being stored during WWII and in the aftermath. The current collection stands at 1291 accessions. The collection was sent to Australia but a transposition of lines in the field means that this cannot be treated as a duplicate collection. As landraces are usually mixtures, many of the accessions still retain variable levels of genetic heterogeneity. In addition, during a century-long effort of regeneration, some pollen cross-contamination is inevitably expected.

Genotyping the tetraploid section and comparing it to Watkins’s original wheat ear herbarium samples, suggests that the original geographic data has dissociated from the existing conserved diversity, hence the registered country of origin of these landraces as well as the names revealing a geographic origin should not be considered as trustworthy indicators for the germplasm origin. Effort is underway to restore the lost data using herbarium genomics. 

In more recent times a renewed interest in characterising and utilising the genetic variation within this collection resulted in the stabilisation through SSD of 1063 hexaploid (derived from 828 landraces) and 354 tetraploid lines, available from GRU as the "Watkins Stabilised Collection of Tetraploid and Hexaploid Landrace Wheats". 

Use the filter buttons in the 'Search and Sort Pane' below to select accessions based on category.