Cryopreservation of eucalyptus genetic resources.

The long-term preservation of forest genetic resources is a vital part of preserving our forest crops for future generations. Unfortunately, there are few genebanks dedicated to forest trees and very few methods for long-term preservation of forest genetic resources collections aside from field plantings of a limited number of seed-derived or elite clonal individuals. The use of cryopreservation for the long-term storage of elite germplasm is increasingly being used for the long-term preservation of clonal agronomic crops but for forest trees, such as Eucalyptus, the methodology for cryopreservation of diverse genetic resources collections has not been established.