Organisation of a workshop entitled "Referenced food crop germplasm banks for international collaboration

71 participants from 28 countries, including crop specialists, breeders ans germplams managers have exchanged their background in term of definition and use of crop reference germplasm. This was done either through oral presentations and/or posters, and was structured as communications and brainstorming sessions. The main conclusions are :
 The Generation Challenge Program approach was affirmed in exploring, evaluating and using germplams diversity, in defining reference sets on the principles that all GCP products must be delivered to users.
 The expectation extends also to related initiatives in the System-Wide Genetic Resources Program (SGRP) of the CGIAR, the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Global Partnership Initiative for Plant Breeding Capacity Building (GIPB). GCP-derived reference sets can play a prominent role provided that there is clarity on political availability of the resource and the attached data by placing them under the Multi-Lateral System and that research continues on their use as an entry to the broader collections. Their description and access have a natural place in the web system being put in place by the SGRP and Bioversity, which can therefore be used for publicising and ordering.
 Information has been shared about how many reference sets are available, how they were compiled and what their status is. Together with this, we have been made aware of the broad diversity of situations among crops and some limitations that need to be overcome, on representation and comprehensiveness of original composite collections, choice and justification of methodology to select reference sets, data quality of both collections, composite and reference, traceability of germplasm, availability of the minimum required information to be distributed with the material and quality control (label, certification, …) of the material to be distributed