**4. Conventional approach to conservation**

Before technological approaches to conservation were birthed, humans were conservation inclined. There has always been a need to preserve food materials for commercial purposes and to ensure their continual survival. Msuya and Kideghesho [14], outlined nine traditional conservation practices by the locals for medicinal plants. They include domestication, beliefs in sacred forests, beliefs in sacredness of trees, respect for cultural forests, protection of plants at burial rites, selective harvesting, secrecy, use of energy-saving traditional stoves, and collection of deadwood for firewood. The setbacks in these crude practices were climatic factors, pests and diseases, poverty, development activities, and changing agricultural policies. Traditional approaches are not sustainable and cannot meet our ever-growing population. Genetic erosion and poor management are factors delimitating traditional crops [15].

### **5. Advances in plant genetic resources**

The conservation and use of plant genetic resources are important to the continued maintenance and improvement of agricultural and forestry production and, thus, to sustainable development and poverty alleviation. The objective of plant genetic resources conservation is to preserve as broad a sample of the extant genetic diversity of target species as is scientifically and economically feasible, including currently recognized genes, traits, and genotypes [16].

Germplasm banks are storage repositories equipped with facilities for long time storage. Some facilities have capacity to store genetic materials for 25 years and more. The brain behind conservation of plant genetic resources is to have a lot of variation. Variation in genetic resources affords farmers and researchers with options for breeding and other programs. Diversity of both landraces and introduced varieties ensure that the food global basket is never empty [12, 17].

Molecular and in vitro culture techniques are great tools. In vitro culture such as tissue culture provides multiplication of plantlets or clones of endangered plants. Tissue culture generates plant free from viruses, bacteria, or fungi. Molecular markers have been deployed in diversity study and for generating data for plant fingerprint. They are used to identify cultivars or landraces; used to discover important genes of interest and characterization of species [5]

The integration of big data into breeding programs is revolutionary. Generating sequence information is no longer a bottleneck to crop improvement. Phenotypic characterization has historically been more problematic, but increasingly, molecular phenotypes can be used as indicators of physiological or performance phenotypes, while quantitative imaging techniques using remote sensing can directly measure plant architectural and stress response characteristics in a variety of experimental set-ups [18].

### **6. Biotechnological approach**

In modern agriculture, improved crops are farmers' preferred choice. Crops with improved yield ability, resistance to pests and diseases, and reduced environmental impacts are usually desirable. These are achievable with traditional methods but can be improved and enhanced using biotechnological approaches. The approach is genetically fingerprinting varieties from the wild and landraces. These plants are sequenced, which enables researchers to know which genes are important in conferring the trait that is needed. Utilization of these genes for agricultural purpose is a huge task because it involves a lot of data that the bioinformaticians need to deal with. This computational approach will be used to collect data from plants in gene banks and analyze promising plants for further analysis [19].

In an ever-growing population, to meet food demand, a sustainable system for food production is necessary. A very exquisite technique is the use of in vitro culture and cryopreservation, which is making it easy to conserve genetic resources especially seeds since most are difficult to conserve. Also, techniques such as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is used in testing healthy seeds against pathogens. Another method is tissue culture, used for eliminating systemic diseases like viruses for germplasm conservation. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and other molecular approaches are proving useful improvements in collection, accessioning, and resolving taxonomic discrepancies in relationship [19].

Molecular techniques are continuously evolving and their application in determining variation has been successfully applied in plant breeding. Molecular techniques for detecting variation include restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), use for cutting short sequences of interest, and the use of PCR-based techniques such as amplified fragment length polymorphism; random amplified polymorphic DNA and simple sequence repeats have also proved very effective on genetic diversity study. These are all used to improve the state of plant genetic resources [19].
