Ex situ conservation of plant genetic resources. An overview of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) and lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) worldwide collections.

Collection and conservation of chickpea and lentil germplasm has great importance due to their role as staple food for millions and millions of peoples. Nowadays, the largest chickpea collec-tion, 41.2% of the total accessions, is held by ICRISAT, while the main lentil collection is stored by ICARDA. The main fraction of both collections is constituted by Indian landraces. In the last decades several efforts have been done to integrate all genebanks in a global conservation sys-tem of plant genetic resources. The release of informatics platforms allowed the creation of vir-tual genebanks, that are powerful tools routinely consulted by germplasm users. Information available for chickpea and lentil accessions included in Genesys and EURISCO platforms have been taken in consideration in this mini review. Strength and critical points of worldwide col-lections of both species emerging from the analysis of data obtained by enquiring these two platforms are presented and discussed. The availability of core collections has great utility for germplasm users, while the lack of origin and biological status for a significant fraction of ac-cessions are the main drawbacks. Moreover, it is highlight the necessity to share as much as pos-sible the non omic and omic characterization data.