Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton, Curator of IRRI’s genebank, offers some insights into germplasm documentation and the necessary conversations, and brings up an important caution:
[I]t is a common mantra to call for recipients to return data “to add to the store of information the genebank has on its accessions”. Be careful you don’t encourage genebank curators to attach recipient’s data to their own accessions. That would be wrong. You have to keep the data associated with the recipient’s germplasm, and link their germplasm back to the genebank accession. You need also to know and record the nature of that link. For example, how did they choose the plant to genotype, and how likely is it to be typical of the original heterogeneous accession?
The ICIS mantra is that’s why we use ICIS, not a traditional genebank database. Traditional genebank databases don’t allow you to define links between the genebank’s accession and the recipient’s sample, so you can’t do what you want. If you seriously want to connect recipients’ info back to the accessions, you’d better think seriously about incorporating germplasm tracking into GRIN and Genesys.
ICIS, in case you were wondering, is the International Crop Information System. There are different implementations for different crops. I don’t know whether they talk to each other or to anything else.