An accession is a sample of plant material added to a gene bank or collection and given its own identifier. Its record (passport data) includes where and when it was collected, by whom, the population it came from, and how it has been maintained or regenerated since.
In practice
Gene banks for crops such as maize or wheat hold accessions as seed, tissue culture or field collections. For cannabis the same idea applies to private and community collections. A seed line with a passport record (collection region, year, number of parent plants, every regeneration since) is far more useful to breeders and preservationists than a named pack with no history.
GenetixBay applies accession thinking to member material: each plant or seed line gets an ID, and its origin, lineage and test results are recorded, so a cut or a line can be traced and compared over time.
Don't confuse with
- Cultivar: a variety; one cultivar may be held as several accessions from different sources.
- Strain name: a label without a record.
- Germplasm: the genetic material in general; an accession is one recorded sample of it.
A gene is a stretch of DNA that carries the instructions for one functional product, usually a protein such as an enzyme, and is the basic unit of inheritance.Tissue culture is growing small pieces of a plant on sterile nutrient gel in a sealed vessel, used to multiply, clean up and store cannabis genotypes.Re-veg is returning a flowering or harvested plant to vegetative growth by putting it back under long days, often to save a genotype after harvest.Germplasm is living genetic material (seeds, pollen, tissue or plants) kept for breeding, research or conservation, representing the genetic diversity of a crop.The gene pool is the total set of alleles present in a population, cultivar group or species; a narrow gene pool limits what breeders can select from.A landrace is a traditional, locally adapted cannabis population kept by farmers in one region over many generations, with its own type and plenty of internal variation.An heirloom is a seed line kept and passed down by growers for decades, usually outside its region of origin, preserving an older type rather than a recent hybrid.Genotyping is reading a plant's DNA at selected markers to identify it, compare it with other plants, check sex or chemotype, or estimate its ancestry.
