ИСТИНА

The Botanic garden of the M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University founded in 1706 is one of the oldest in the Russia and possesses successfully developing collections of wild (the arboretum, the alpine section, the taxonomic section, the useful plants section, as well as tropical and subtropical plants) and ornamental plants (roses, peonies, irises, phloxes, lilac, apple-tree, etc.). The Botanic garden participates in and coordinates the projects on biodiversity conservation of the wild flora of Russia. Here grow 105 rare and endangered species included in the Red Data Book of Russian Federation, 60 species included in the Red Data Book of Moscow region and 8 species from Appendix I of Bern convention. Since 2014, the Moscow State University realizes the project “National depositary bank of living systems” dedicated to preserve the biodiversity and create new ways of biological material use. The important part of the project is the information system containing comprehensive data about samples from biological collections, including the use of molecular and genomic technologies. The peony plant collection of the Botanic garden can serve as a good model object for work in the given direction. The collection includes 280 cultivars demonstrating all selection trends, as well as 18 species, many of which included in the Red Data Book of Russian Federation. As is known, high intraspecific variability of morphological characters and hybridization events obscure relationships between Paeonia species. Collection of samples from different populations and geographic regions, supplemented with information about different morphological characters especially that used as diagnostic, chromosome number, geographical distribution, state of populations, and nucleotide sequences of different DNA regions provides a basis for various fundamental studies. Moreover, the peony plant collection can serve as an example of cooperation between fundamental and applied strategies. The knowledge about species helps to identification of origin of cultivars and its ecological preferences during cultivation. While knowledge about cultivars allows to compare results of natural hybridization events with results of the similar processes passing by creation of cultivars. Conduction of comprehensive inventory of the material deposited in the modern electronic databases can improve the way in which garden plant collection is documented. This helps not only in the everyday work with the collections but also in storage and research of the collected plant.