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Bread wheat collection (Triticum aestivum) brought together around 12 000 cultivated lines, a third has French origin, the second third come from Europe and the other third from the rest of the world with about sixty different countries represented.

Among French material, the collection gathers old varieties or "landraces" from the 19th century, first French varieties bred in France (Vilmorin's collection), as well as the last "elite" lines from the end of 20th century. The wide coverage of breeding period allows retracing the history of bread wheat selections in France, given that the pedigree is known. Beside

these patrimonial resources, foreign material is composed of genetic resources more traditional (breeding lines). Due to the

whole of this resource, INRA collection is one of the first cereal collections at European level.

This whole collection is described for agro-morphological traits - height, spike descriptors (awn, hairiness), growth habit, and resistance to lodging or major diseases (mildews, rusts). An estimation of some technological parameters linked to bread-making quality has been realized by a NIRS methodology on most part of accessions. Also, diversity analysis at molecular level are realized on a part of the collection for 200 000 SNP markers.

Durum wheat collection (Triticum durum) gathers around 3 200 accessions. Mainly composed by Triticum durum, it includes also wild interesting genotype as wild emmer (Triticum dicoccoïdes), cultivated emmer (Triticum dicoccum), rivet wheat (Triticum turgidum), etc...

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) collection contains around 6 600 lines. It is composed mainly of traditional genetic resources (cultivated varieties) as scientific material represents only 10 % of this collection. The most part of material comes from foreign introduction of the major geographical area: Europe, Asia, North America, Australia, New-Zealand, South Africa and Morocco. Data on pedigree as well as agronomic descriptors are provided for two third of barley varieties.

Triticale (X Triticosecale) is a cereal species recently developed by man, landrace do not exist. On the other hand, all the rye and bread wheat variability is available to breed new "primary" triticale. So, only some varieties, recently bred, are conserved in the collection as well as scientific material used to breed primary triticale. This collection gathered about a 1 400 triticale varieties, or breeding lines, for which an evaluation is in process.

For oat (Avena sativa), collection gathered around 1 600 varieties cultivated in France, for the most part with a French origin (65%). The rest of the collection comes mainly from Germany, North America, Sweden and the United-Kingdom. This collection with patrimonial value had been evaluated during two European projects (GENRES CT99-106 and AGRI GEN RES 870/2004). As well as agronomic traits, an estimation of biochemical characteristics (protein and cellulose) has been done by NIRS methodology.

Finally, Rye (Secale cereale) collection contains 80 local populations native mainly to Massif Central (France), and Portugal, too. This small collection, perhaps, does not represent the past French rye diversity, which has probably disappeared.

Acquisition of new genetic resources

BRC acquires biological resources and integrates them into the collection after validation and control according to the procedure "Acquisition of BR" 13 11 39 000009.

Introduction of new accession could originate from:

• BRC, to conserve for example the genetic diversity existing at French level,
• Scientists in a framework of research programmes. For any request, refer to BRC terms and conditions which explains how to proceed.