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Abstract Genebanks conserve worldwide crop genetic diversity in systematically assembled and maintained ex situ collections for use by plant breeders and geneticists to improve the productivity, value, and sustainability of agriculture. Challenges faced in genebank management include providing sufficient and accurate trait information to facilitate searching the collection; controlling redundant accessions, seed mixtures, and mislabeled accessions; and identifying gaps in diversity. To help address these issues, a system that employs genotyping using 24 trait‐specific markers (TSMs), fingerprint markers (FPMs), or markers that are unique to subspecies was implemented for the USDA–ARS National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS), National Small Grains Collection (NSGC) for rice ( Oryza sativa L.). Trait‐specific markers were used to validate phenotypic data for fragrance, pericarp color, apparent amylose content, starch pasting properties, gelatinization temperature, resistance to rice blast disease, plant pubescence, and plant height. Discrepancies between genotypic and phenotypic data are useful for quality control during curation or may present opportunities for identifying novel alleles, particularly for TSMs. Over 2,000 accessions were classified by species, O. sativa or O. glaberrima Steud.; subspecies, Indica or Japonica ; and subpopulation, aromatic , indica , aus , temperate japonica , or tropical japonica using the subspecies marker and FPMs. This small panel of TSMs and FPMs was also adequate for differentiating important U.S. cultivars, which are primarily of tropical japonica background. As a result of this study, TSM and FPM descriptors will be added to the rice NSGC database, redundancies reduced, and mislabeled accessions corrected, thus increasing the value of the rice NSGC for breeding programs and providing new opportunities for gene discovery.
McClung et al. (Mon,) studied this question.