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Accessions

An accession is a distinct sample of germplasm representing a cultivar, breeding line, or a wild or cultivated population, maintained in a genebank for conservation and use. Its genetic stability is optimally preserved through careful monitoring and multiplication.

The passport data records where the material is coming from, who provided it, what it is, and what it is called. An accession-level record is created immediately when new material arrives in the genebank, either from a collecting mission, from a transfer from another genebank or breeding program. The record is assigned a temporary number and the passport data regarding its provenance, collecting, donation or breeding pedigree is recorded. The passport data of material in genebanks is commonly exchanged following the Multi-Crop Passport Descriptors (MCPD) standard.

Not all material will be accepted into the collection. Regardless, the passport data is never discarded and becomes part of the historical archive of the genebank and allows for checking whether material was already received, accepted or rejected by the genebank in the past.

The information about the physical material of one accession from one or more generations, split into packets and maintained in different storage locations, is recorded as accession inventory. The bulk of the data generated by the genebank is linked to individual physical inventories, not to the accession as a whole.