Modern investigations of plant genetic resources. Development of scientific schools and guidelines founded by N.I. Vavilov

The issue No. 3 of the journal “Ecological Genetics” is dedicated to the 135^th anniversary of Academician Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, which is celebrated on November 25, 2022. N.I. Vavilov laid the foundations for systematic work with the world collections of cultivated plants and their wild relatives. To carry out large-scale work on the study of plant genetic resources, N.I. Vavilov attracted geneticists, biochemists, and physiologists to the institute he created. A distinctive feature of the extensive large-scale and complex studies of the VIR gene pool were the approaches that allowed generalizations of the observations made in the light of hereditary variability. The fundamental works of Vavilov and his associates in the direction of complex research of cultivated plants allowed to make cardinal transformations in the entire scientific and production chain “collection–prebeeding–beeding–seed production–production”. This issue presents a cross-section of modern works in the field of the study of plant genetic resources, which demonstrates the continuity and development at a new level of the directions founded by N.I. Vavilov and his associates.