Preface

The purpose of this module is to introduce you to the topic of plant genetic resources (PGR). The many different aspects of PGR is reflected by the diversity of topics in the module. You will get a broad overview of the topic at the price that for individual topics it will be a bit superficial.

There is a trade-off between being concise and providing enough information to understand each topic in full detail to enable critical thinking and to be sufficiently state-of-the art to develop novel ideas (i.e., preventing the reinvention of the wheel).

The course consists of asynchronous recorded lectures, in class discussions, asynchronous computer labs and discussions of computer labs in class as well as one small data analysis project and one poster of a scientific paper.

The goal is to provide an introduction into the basic concepts of the field, to present the state of the art, and to teach critical, in particular computational, skills.

The recorded lectures and the slides should be sufficient to understand the material. The lecture notes help us to structure the content and to provide you with some additional information. The lecture notes are introduced with a motivating example, followed by the main content of the topic. At the end there are further (optional) reading tips, a summary of the key concepts, review and discussion questions and problems. The review and discussion questions will be used in class and being able to anser them and to be able to know the definitions of the key concepts is the best preparation for the final exam.