![]() Rajeev Varshney, presently at Murdoch University in Australia, put a vast sequencing project in motion when he was at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in India. In this context, a seed bank's tens-of-thousands of samples, or accessions, as they are generally known, start to look like rich pickings for anyone trying to understand how crops tick. "The gene bank is part of open science," says van Zonneveld. Other crops have their devotees, and their collections, dotted around the globe.īy and large, these resources are available to plant breeders looking to create better, hardier, or tastier crops. Wheat and corn and their little-known wild relatives swell the storage facilities of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center not far from Mexico City. More than 132,000 samples of rice varieties reside in the International Rice Genebank in the Philippines. Peppers, too, are a specialty, and gene bank manager Maarten van Zonneveld has a particular yen for the mung bean. In some circles, the World Vegetable Center in Taiwan is famed for the completeness of their aubergine collection. These gene banks are managed by foundations, universities and governments. There, collections of the world's crops are held in stasis in case of future need, like a catastrophic volcanic eruption, a world war, or rapid sea level rise.īut what most people don't fully comprehend is that the Vault is primarily a back-up, a very placid hard drive of genetic material from a kaleidoscope of far more active facilities all around the world. The words "seed bank", might conjure up the so-called Doomsday Vault, on the island of Svalbard. ![]() Imagine an eerie slice of concrete on a frozen northern isle, holding a vault of seeds against the end of the world.
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