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Genebanks, other than their pivotal role as diversity conservation repositories, regenerate part of their collection every year to maintain their material in optimal conditions. During regeneration cycles, morpho-physiological data are collected, contributing to the creation of large datasets that offer a valuable resource of information. In Italy, rice cultivation has been documented since the second half of the 15th century, and nowadays, Italy contributes more than 50% of the total European rice production. The ex situ collection of rice (mainly Oryza sativa L. subgroup japonica) held at the Research Center for Cereal and Industrial Crops (CREA-CI) of Vercelli is quite unique in Italy and its establishment dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. The collection is hereby presented through the analysis of 21 years of historic data, from 2001 to 2022, in 17 different locations in Northern Italy, for a total of 6592 entries, 677 genotypes analyzed and 9 phenotypic traits under investigation. An R script has been developed to analyze the dataset. The BLUEs calculation, heritability, PCA and correlation with weather data provided a comprehensive overview of the germplasm stored in the genebank. The great variability and phenotypic diversity were assessed, key aspects from the perspective of breeding programs. This work starts a re-evaluation of historic data, historic cultivars, and represents the first step toward the shift of the genebank to a bio-digital resource center.

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) has been widely used as a model crop for studying molecular and physiological processes such as chloroplast development and photosynthesis. During the second half of the 20th century, mutants such as albostrians led to the discovery of the nuclear-encoded, plastid-localized RNA polymerase and the retrograde (chloroplast-to-nucleus) signalling communication pathway, while chlorina-f2 and xantha mutants helped to shed light on the chlorophyll biosynthetic pathway, on the light-harvesting proteins and on the organization of the photosynthetic apparatus. However, during the last 30 years, a large fraction of chloroplast research has switched to the more “user-friendly” model species Arabidopsis thaliana, the first plant species whose genome was sequenced and published at the end of 2000. Despite its many advantages, Arabidopsis has some important limitations compared to barley, including the lack of a real canopy and the absence of the proplastid-to-chloroplast developmental gradient across the leaf blade. These features, together with the availability of large collections of natural genetic diversity and mutant populations for barley, a complete genome assembly and protocols for genetic transformation and gene editing, have relaunched barley as an ideal model species for chloroplast research. In this review, we provide an update on the genomics tools now available for barley, and review the biotechnological strategies reported to increase photosynthesis efficiency in model species, which deserve to be validated in barley.