Origins of BRC4Plants, the French network of Plant Biological Resource Centers (BRC) for research

Since their inception, the French academic organizations for research in agriculture have built plant collections to support the study of plant traits and the development of new improved varieties. Among the oldest academic French collections, the grapevine collection began to be established in the late 19^th century by the College of Agriculture of Montpellier, to tackle the challenges of mildews and phylloxera that were devastating French viticulture (Pouget, 1990). Another emblematic example is the creation in the 1960s of the PRO-MAIS French non-governmental organization grouping all the French maize breeders to facilitate collaborations with the academic sector, in particular to collect and conserve maize genetic resources (Dallard, Noel, Gouesnard, & Boyat, 2000). Today, the conservation of biodiversity – particularly cultivated biodiversity or agrobiodiversity – is more crucial than ever and is key for adaptation to the accelerating global changes impacting the planet, human health and nutrition (ECPGR, 2021; Lefèvre et al., 2024; Pilling et al., 2020).

The organization and evolution of the French activities dedicated to genetic resource conservation are described in (Roux-Cuvelier, Grisoni, Bellec, Bloquel, & Charron, 2021). Here, we summarize the main steps and provide additional insights.

In 1983, the French Ministry of Agriculture set up a coordination office for the conservation of genetic resources (plants and domestic animals) which operated until 2008 – the Bureau de Ressources Génétiques (BRG). The BRG was a Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique, a French associative structure gathering under a memorandum of understanding the Ministries of Research, Agriculture and Environment and six French Research Institutes. It had three main mandates: the coordination of genetic resource management, the representation of France in international bodies, and the facilitation of genetic resource research. The BRG was in particular mandated to implement a decentralized system for PGR conservation and to facilitate the establishment of commodity-specific and multi-stakeholders networks – including academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, regional organizations and private companies – to carry out this conservation. After 2008, the French Government decided to merge BRG with a newly created foundation, the Fondation pour la Recherche sur la Biodiversité. In reality, coordination and facilitation – in particular for basic genetic resource conservation activities – have not been taken over by the Fondation pour la Recherche sur la Biodiversité, which has focused on supporting the development of biodiversity knowledge. To address this gap, the managers of the plant collections from the main French research institutes developed their own inter-institute networking and coordination activities. Since the end of the 1990s, the management of plant biological resources dedicated to research and development activities (R&D) has been professionalized using the concept of Biological Resource Center (BRC, OECD - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, (OECD, 2001)) as a reference. In particular, academic BRC managers actively contributed to the development of a French quality management norm dedicated to BRCs, S96-900:2011. Later on, they contributed to the international norm dedicated to Biobanking ISO 20387:2018 and its technical specification (ISO/TS 23105:2021) in order to improve the quality of their services, which include, among others, the conservation, documentation and provision to users of plant biological resources. A still growing number of French BRCs dedicated to R&D are certified based on these norms and/or ISO9001. These developments were supported by a French inter-research institute organization, Infrastructures en Biologie, Santé et Agronomie (IBiSA, https://www.ibisa.net/), aiming at labelling research facilities and funding their developments.

In 2015, the informal network of plant BRCs supported by French academic organizations joined four other BRC networks on domestic animals, microbes, forest trees and environmental samples to set up a national infrastructure of resources for research in agriculture, RARe (https://www.agrobrc-rare.org; Figure 1) (Tixier-Boichard et al., 2024). RARe is included in the French Ministry of Research’s roadmap and will soon need to reapply for this label, which provides access to funding and recognition. The plant network was named BRC4Plants: it currently gathers 21 BRCs, including the French National Center of Genomic Resources (CNRGV, Table 1). The network spans the entire French territory, including overseas departments and regions, and conserves species cultivated in a wide range of climates (Figure 2).

The main missions of BRC4Plants’s BRCs are to 1) ensure the proper maintenance of crop diversity in relation to the challenges faced by both biodiversity and agriculture (Lefèvre et al., 2024) and 2) provide access to high-quality biological resources and associated data to the scientific community of plant biologists and breeders. BRC4Plants coordination activities aim to effectively support these initiatives through strategic discussions and decisions, training and facilitation.

BRC4Plants has developed a formal governance structure that supports strategic decisions through a committee comprising representatives of the main funding institutes (INRAE, the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment; CIRAD, the French agricultural research and cooperation organization working for the sustainable development of tropical and Mediterranean regions, and IRD, the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development) and the coordinator of RARe who meet twice a year. In addition, coordinated cross-cutting activities are organized both at the plant network level and the RARe level. For instance, all BRCs are supported by such internal transversal activities for their compliance with access and benefit sharing (ABS) rules, the General Data Protection Regulation and for their capacity to become certified ISO9001. In 2020, RARe established its international scientific advisory board comprising experts of all domains, which has met annually since then, along with an annual thematic scientific workshop. These two new annual events foster scientific strategic discussions across domains. RARe facilitated the contribution of several networks to common projects such as the Coordination Support Action of the H2020 EC programme, ‘GenRes Bridge’ (grant agreement No 817580). The GenRes Bridge project partners developed a Genetic Resources Strategy for Europe (GenRes Bridge Project Consortium, ECPGR, ERFP and EUFORGEN, 2021) in collaboration with the three European networks for the conservation of genetic resources – the European Cooperative Programme for Plant Genetic Resources (ECPGR), the European Forest Genetic Resources Programme (EUFORGEN) and the Regional Focal Point for Animal Genetic Resources (ERFP). BRC4Plants coordinated a strategic document on data management (Adam-Blondon et al., 2021).

Finally, RARe has clarified the conditions necessary for a BRC to join or leave the infrastructure. As a result, within some of the RARe’s networks such as BRC4Plants, BRCs are divided into two groups: full members of RARe and those in progress towards membership. BRC4Plants is currently composed of 18 RARe member BRCs and three in-progress BRCs (Table 1). The difference between these two statuses is not yet significant as the only benefits obtained by BRCs from RARe derive from low-cost networking activities and it is not in the global interest to restrict access. However, the criteria of differentiation (certification of the quality management and/or IBiSA label) might soon be important for getting access to some funding dedicated to BRCs. After almost ten years of operation, this framework has reached its full maturity and its renewal on the roadmap is planned for 2025.

BRC4Plants collections and services for the research community

Crop genetic and genomic resources have always been instrumental for research in plant genetics, plant biology and for fostering academic and socio-economic research and development partnerships. They have been intensively used to characterize genetic diversity, explore the evolutionary history of crops, develop advanced genomic tools, select panels of genetic resources for association studies, carry out pan-genome studies, develop prediction models and breeding strategies, screen for adaptive traits, and decipher molecular mechanisms with mutant collections (Allier, Teyssèdre, Lehermeier, Moreau, & Charcosset, 2020; Healey, Garsmeur, & Lovell, 2024; Jourdan et al., 2015; Leuenberger et al., 2024).

Most BRCs and their collections are managed or co-managed by INRAE, CIRAD and IRD in partnership with technical institutes and higher education institutions (Roux-Cuvelier et al., 2021).

As a whole, BRC4Plants maintains 214,918 accessions of a large range of model species, field crops, vegetables and fruit trees (Table 1). An accession is defined as an entry in the collection and the unit of conservation. A crop variety can be represented by several accessions. Different types of material (samples) can be conserved and distributed from a given accession: reproductive (e.g. seeds, in vitro plants, pollen, cuttings, etc.) or non-reproductive (e.g. leaf, DNA, etc.). The collections are usually very diverse, in terms of accessions’ country of origin, phenotypes or genetic diversity (Salinier et al., 2022). They include varieties, landraces and wild relatives but also material derived from breeding or research programmes (Esnault et al., 2025; Roux-Cuvelier et al., 2021; Salinier et al., 2022).

In addition, CNRGV develops and maintains plant genomic resources with a catalogue of more than 300 bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) libraries (around 35 million samples) from more than 60 different plant species. CNRGV provides the research community with a range of services to characterize genetic resources at the genomic level with cutting-edge technologies, in collaboration with other French national genomic facilities that together allow the production of high-quality reference genomes required for diversity analysis and association studies, and the detailed analysis of intraspecific diversity at loci carrying key genes.

In 2022, BRC4Plants provided around 13,000 genetic resources accessions, over 100 BAC clones or libraries and globally billed an important vol-ume of genomic services to a diversified panel of users: 49% to French public institutes, 37% to foreign public institutes, 13% to private companies or producers and 1% to schools, regional public structures, NGOs etc. The introduction and distribution activities follow national and international regulations concerning sanitary issues and ABS. The terms of access to BRC’s services are avail-able on the CNRGV website for genomic services (http s://cnrgv.toulouse.inra.fr/fr/Services) and on the web portal of BRC4Plants for the other BRCs (e.g. https://f lorilege.arcad-project.org/fr/crb/bracysol/conditions-g enerales). The Standard Material Transfert Agreement (SMTA) of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) is used for species on Annex 1 of ITPGRFA. An INRAE stan-dard material transfer agreement, compliant with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Nagoya Pro-tocol is used for other species or for material developed by INRAE (e.g. segregating population, pre-breeding material, etc.). In case of scarcity of the material for distribution, the priority has been so far to support research, development and training.

BRC4Plants activities (of individual BRCs as well as those coordinated by the network) are supported by academic organizations, within the framework of their research priorities, with permanent positions dedicated to the BRC missions and a wide range of infrastructures, including robots, refrigerators, freezers (-20°C and -80°C), cryotanks, seed drying rooms, greenhouses, field plots for seed regeneration or plant conservation (vegetatively-propagated or perennial plants).

The network as a whole also provides an important volume of communication activities that contribute to raising awareness of genetic resources to a large audience (e.g. (Pic, Curk, & Luro, 2017), New York Times (Poll, 2021), Le Monde (Rosier, 2021)). Finally, the network contributes to training and education on biodiversity conservation as well as on genomic approaches.

BRC4Plants R&D activities

BRC4Plants regularly updates its priorities in terms of R&D, which can be seen at two levels.

First, R&D activities that aim at improving the efficiency of conservation and distribution of accessions. Key areas include transversal issues such as management and legal compliance regarding phytosanitary and ABS issues (Tixier-Boichard et al., 2024), FAIR (data are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data management and automated data workflows between local databases and central information systems, andimproved cryopreservation methods (Markovic et al., 2015). These activities also include local improvements of processes and equipment in BRCs and are mainly funded by French research organizations, the French National Research Agency or sometimes European Funds for Regional Development (FEDER).

The second level includes R&D activities aiming at improving services dedicated to research projects using genetic resources to achieve their goals: development of new services, such as the development of new populations and core collections (Esnault et al., 2017; Salinier et al., 2022; Terzić et al., 2020), new knowledge on biological resources, e.g. through their genomic or phenotypic characterization (Antoine et al., 2023; Martínez-Flores et al., 2020), and improved breeding strategies (Sanchez et al., 2023). These R&D activities are supported by a diverse set of national and European calls and the applications are frequently driven by public and/or private researchers who are not BRC members. Calls dedicated to infrastructures at the national or international level can be an opportunity to work with other infrastructures. For instance, BRC4Plants has actively liaised with the European infrastructures EMPHASIS (plant phenotyping) and ELIXIR (bioinformatics for life sciences) to contribute to the development of a suite of guidelines and resources supporting FAIR-compliant management of plant genotyping and phenotyping data. This work was supported by several EU programme Horizon 2020-funded projects: ELIXIR-Excelerate, grant agreement no. 676559 https://elixir-europe.org/about-us/how-funded/eu-projects/excelerate; AGENT, grant agreement no. 862613 https://www.agent-project.eu/ and ELIXIR-CONVERGE, grant agreement no. 871075 https://elixir-europe.org/about-us/how-funded/eu-projects/converge, and all the results can be accessed through the ELIXIR portal of resources for data management (https://rdmkit.elixir-europe.org/). Building on these resources, a national project currently gathers partners from three French national infrastructures, RARe, the French Institute of Bioinformatics (https://www.france-bioinformatique.fr/) and INRAE Genomics (https://inrae-genomics.hub.inrae.fr/) to develop a comprehensive service of genomic data management from data production to data submission to the European archives maintained by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). Projects including the characterization of PGR or the development of pre-breeding populations can be funded by national calls dedicated to public–private partnerships. They often build on the trust developed in the public-private networks in which many of the BRCs are involved (see below and Table 1). They can also be funded by the European Commission (e.g. H2020 G2P-Sol project, grant agreement no. 677379, http://www.g2p-sol.eu/).

BRC4Plants organizes training and dissemination activities to ensure that the outputs of the projects can be leveraged by all BRCs.

Public–private partnerships

Half of the BRCs collaborate with networks gathering different types of partners (seed companies, breeders, extension institutes, regional organizations for genetic resource conservation, NGOs; Table 1, Figure 3 ). These collaborative networks, established in the 1990s, aim to pool efforts to manage and study mostly traditional genetic resources of a species or a related group of species. A model charter for these ‘genetic resources networks’ was developed in 2018 and updated in 2021 by BRC4Plants, INRAE central services, the French Seed Association and the French Ministry of Agriculture to define the rules for material and data exchange within and out of the network. Some of these networks have formal organizations (e.g. Promaïs for maize, http://pro-maize-corn.com/, the Federation Française de la Rose for the rose or a joint unit of INRAE with the Institut Français de la Vigne et du Vin, IFV, for grapevine).

The existence of such partnerships has made it possible to inventory and secure old French genetic material (e.g. (Dallard et al., 2000; Terzić et al., 2020)). Additionally, the grapevine-dedicated joint unit has been instrumental in exchanging technical expertise. IFV and INRAE have also brought together all the other French regional extension services for viticulture and oenology to formally organize the development of grapevine varieties resistant to diseases and adapted to each French terroir (INRA, 2018). INRAE and IFV are promoting both traditional genetic resources (a renewal of interest for old varieties was observed in many places) and new resistant varieties under the brand ENTAV-INRA (www.entav-inra.fr). Similarly, a convention between INRAE and the four French potato breeders gathered within the association named ACVNPT (Association des Créateurs de Variétés Nouvelles de Pomme de Terre) was signed in 1995. ACVNPT provides financial support to INRAE for the conservation and characterization of potato genetic resources maintained within the BrACySol BRC, and in return gets free access to the pre-breeding material generated by INRAE within the framework of its research activities (Esnault et al., 2025; Kerlan et al., 2017). Since 1995, INRAE has proposed 994 pre-breeding clones, improved mainly for resistance to biotic stress. Forty-one potato varieties, originating from these pre-breeding clones, have been registered.

BRC4Plants contribution to the French National Coordination for Plant Genetic Resources activities

BRC4Plants is a self-organized, research-driven network of BRCs. Many other organizations are contributing to the conservation of PGR in France (Duval et al., 2023): regional centres, NGOs, the Network of Botanical Conservatories, private companies, etc. The French Ministry of Agriculture is in charge of developing the French strategy for the conservation and use of PGR for food and agriculture. In particular, this strategy aims to contribute to FAO’s global plans of action on genetic resources and to the ITPGRFA (Duval et al., 2023). To support this endeavour, the Ministry established the French National Coordination for PGR, which comprises a national support structure hosted within GEVES (Group for the Study and Control of Varieties and Seeds) and a section of the French multi-stakeholder organization CTPS (Permanent Technical Selection Committee). This coordination is responsible for implementing French policies on genetic resources ( (Duval et al., 2023); Figure 3). BRC4Plants contributes to the CTPS plant genetic resources section and facilitates, in collaboration with its funding bodies, the official recognition of BRCs through ministerial acknowledgement. This recognition identifies them as managers of genetic resources and acknowledges their contribution to the French National Collection of Genetic Resources (Duval et al., 2023). So far, INRAE and the Etablissement Vanille de Tahiti have been officially recognized as managers of genetic resources and INRAE is yearly increasing the official collection set under its responsibility in collaboration with its BRCs (MAA, 2022; MAA, 2024).

The French National Coordinator for Plant Genetic Resources is also the French National Coordinator for ECPGR ( (Duval et al., 2023); Figure 3). BRC4Plants’ coordination and its BRCs are actively contributing to ECPGR Working Groups (Table 1) dedicated to crops as well as to cross-cutting themes. In collaboration with the National Coordination, BRC4Plants deposits data in the European Search Catalogue for Plant Genetic Resources (EURISCO), managed by ECPGR, and contributes to the inclusion of accession collections in the ITPGRFA multilateral system. In 2019, ECPGR launched the European Evaluation Network (EVA) which leverages public–private partnerships at the pre-competitive stage, to jointly generate standardized characterization and evaluation data on crop accessions present in European genebanks. These accessions are often poorly characterized and, consequently, underutilized. ECPGR provides the EVA networks with standards and platforms for documentation and results sharing (Kumar, Guzzon, Goritschnig, & Weise, 2024). So far, four French BRCs are contributing to EVA networks: CRB GAMéT for maize (Balconi et al., 2024), CRB CARPIA for carrot (Goritschnig et al., 2023) and CRB-Leg for pepper and lettuce.

Conclusions and perspectives

The overarching goal of BRC4Plants is to facilitate the mobilization of its resources and services for research and innovation, with the aim of enhancing genetic diversity and beneficial interactions within agroecosystems. This supports the agroecological transition and the development of sustainable and healthy food systems. The network of BRCs plays an important role as a source of genetic diversity to be screened for new traits (e.g. plant-plant or plant-microbe favourable interactions). BRCs can also support the development of new plant materials for research on new breeding or cropping strategies. In this context, BRC4Plants faces several challenges that will need to be addressed through a mix of social, technical and scientific approaches:

• How should BRC4Plants be organized to address new needs regarding species, material development or introduction of accessions, while ensuring these efforts remain feasible within a realistic level of funding and support?

• How to increase in situ dynamic conservation activities and their integration with ex situ conservation?

• How to deal with the threats associated with climate change, including the spread of new diseases, in particular for the conservation of perennial plants in orchards?

• How to ensure that the variety of jobs necessary for the management and dissemination of genetic resources remains attractive and rewarding despite increasing legal and administrative complexity and responsibility?

Tackling these challenges requires the co-construction of strategies with BRC4Plants supporting research organizations, as well as with other stakeholders involved in the conservation and use of genetic resources, in particular with the National Coordination on PGR. The current lack of full alignment or integration between research, agriculture and environment-driven national governance on PGR conservation is reducing the efficiency of efforts to coordinate the different stakeholders. It should be noted that this lack of integration is also a challenge at the European level and was identified as a major issue in the Genetic Resources Strategy for Europe developed in the frame of the GenRes Bridge project (GenRes Bridge Project Consortium, ECPGR, ERFP and EUFORGEN, 2021).

Nevertheless, at the national level, RARe, as a national research infrastructure, is an effective platform for conveying messages through its participation in ministry-driven committees and initiatives, its governance committee, which includes representatives of its main supporting institutes, and its advisory committee, which includes members of the research community and other international infrastructures. RARe can develop and present coordinated perspectives on issues common to all genetic resources domains (e.g. implementation of the French law on ABS or phytosanitary risk management). In addition, BRC4Plants operates at the interface of a significant variety of stakeholders as illustrated in Figure 3. This position enables it to co-develop responses and solutions with research organizations, different types of genetic resources users, and policymakers, such as national decision support systems dedicated to ABS or diseases under regulation. Another important benefit of these multi-stakeholder approaches is a more realistic distribution of responsibilities among research organization central offices, official agencies and individual BRC managers.

The contribution of BRC4Plants BRCs to multi-stakeholder networks facilitates the development of species-specific collaborations aiming at characterizing and enhancing the use of PGR. However, a challenge now is to expand their diversity to include new players such as farmers, citizens, or industries, in order to develop integrated in situ and ex situ approaches for the management of genetic resources. This will also require an evolution in networking practices, including the structure of governing and advisory bodies (Louafi et al., 2021). Some BRCs are currently involved in projects aiming at developing a common understanding of different stakeholders and expectations, and co-developing common objectives in the context of the conservation and use of genetic resources.

The French choice to organize PGR conservation in a fully decentralized way has some disadvantages in terms of visibility and requires a layer of coordination to avoid redundancy and identify and support common developments and resources. However, it should be noted that nationally centralized genebanks in other countries primarily hold seed-propagated genetic resources and only a few vegetatively propagated species, whereas BRC4Plants manages many of the latter. Moreover, the French academic decentralized network has a historical origin: BRC collections were initially developed by individual researchers for their own breeding and research objectives, and were later centralized by crops by Research Institutes. Since then, they have remained closely linked to research units that contribute to their development, characterization, funding and reputation within their specific species communities of interest. Given the very low level of long-term funding for the basic operation and maintenance of collections, these tight links with research teams, various regional bodies and other stakeholders such as industry have been instrumental in raising funds for BRCs. The decentralized organization also offers significant flexibility for including new partners with additional collections or new expertise and tools. Additionally, it can provide backup solutions should any of the BRCs face problems due for example to climatic and environmental changes (perennials) or changes in the local scientific and technical teams (all types of BRCs).

Many of the challenges described above are also relevant in other countries (Smith, Nickson, & Challender, 2021). On the other hand, the international level can provide cooperation and solutions. At the European level, the conservation of genetic resources is organized in a decentralized model by ECPGR, which fosters cooperation under the ITPGRFA principles. BRC4Plants is already well involved in this framework. An ongoing project, PRO-GRACE (https://www.grace-ri.eu/pro-grace), funded by the EU programme Horizon Europe (grant agreement no. 101094738) aims at extending or completing this framework through the creation of a pan-European Research Infrastructure on PGR. BRC4Plants is keen to contribute to such an infrastructure, including through its links with other national (e.g. METABOHUB for metabolomics, PROFI for proteomics and France Genomics for genomics) and European infrastructures (EMPHASIS for phenotyping and ELIXIR for life science data) that could be leveraged in the context of the characterization and use of genetic resources. Such a Research Infrastructure would strengthen the links of BRCs with public and private researchers in to foster their contributions to addressing the current challenges of agriculture ¹ .

Acknowledgements

The network BRC4Plants thanks the Research Infrastructure AgroBRC-RARe, the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE, Biological Resource Centers for plants of AgroBRC-RARe, BRC4Plants https://doi.org/10.17180/WN42-3J20), the French agricultural research organization and international cooperation for sustainable development tropical and Mediterranean regions (CIRAD), the French public research organization for equitable partnerships with the countries of the South and in French Overseas Territories (IRD), the GIS IBiSA, Institut Agro and the Alliance Nationale de Recherche pour l'Environnement (AllEnvi) for supporting its activities. The writing of the paper was also supported by the Horizon Europe programme project ‘Promoting a Plant Genetic Resource Community for Europe (PRO-GRACE)’, no. 101094738.

Authors contributions

VB and AFAB drafted the paper, JMA, AB, AD, JD, SD, FE, EG, BG, CJ, AL, PL, NM, CM, FN, NP de la R, AP, VR and PT revised it. AP and EG contributed to the design of the figures.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest