As long as pests and diseases continue to evolve, we need a very wide gene pool of varieties of every crop.
Despite its outstanding position, the Brazilian citriculture is established on a very limited pool of varieties that limits its expansion and restricts the fruit availability throughout the year.
e "KLM" is a multiple cross between cultivars Klein × Local (a pool of local varieties of INTA Pergamino breeding program including "Guayacán INTA", "Charata INTA") × "Manfredi" (a pool of varieties from INTA Manfredi breeding program including "Impira INTA", "Cordobés INTA", "Manfredi INTA").
Acknowledging that "exotic germplasm" may at times make all the difference between competitors' similar products, conventional plant-breeding activities still rely heavily on the largest possible gene pool of improved varieties, while successfully marketed varieties constitute the backbone of conventional breeding programmes.
We can then assume that we sampled almost if not all the diversity of the pool of conventional varieties at the genotyped loci, and that, to a large extent, we did not falsely qualify alleles as original.
The frequencies of these alleles within the weedy pool are strongly correlated with their frequencies within the pool of conventional varieties: it suggests that the main part of these 'cultivated' alleles come from the varieties, either through the initial crop-wild hybrids introduced in the field or from gene flow from the varieties cultivated in the field towards the weedy populations.
Thus, the genetic characterization of these landraces, which is itself a snapshot of a dynamic gene pool of traditional varieties adapted to the local environment and in harmony with cultural preferences, represents an important foundation towards conserving this valuable genetic diversity and applying the knowledge gained towards improving rice varieties for future generations.
While on the other hand, for follow-on innovators and cultivators, the prospects to use material from the protected pool of improved varieties have become increasingly conditional, with important detrimental effects, especially in a highly incremental innovation sphere such as plant improvement (Maskus and Reichman [2005]).
Using R, we then performed a linear regression of C allele frequencies in the weedy pools on C allele frequencies in the pool of conventional varieties.
These observations suggest a common pool of neutral varieties used in the breeding practices of both Muscats and Non-Muscats grapevines.
One question of interest is whether these mixtures will homogenize the pool of traditional varieties, or whether mechanisms such as human practices for instance choice of less admixed plant for seed production [ 55] or divergent environmental pressures for instance, when populations of a given landrace are grown in different environments, [ 21, 56] will maintain some differentiation between them.
