China Opens First National Seed Bank

Ah, the seed bank. Such a great idea. Such a key way of protecting biodiversity, improving food security and enabling research. Though I can't help picturing an ATM sprouting daisies and ivy every time I read those words.

The news on this subject is that China joined the world of seed-banking when it opened the Southwest China Germplasm Bank of Wild Species, its first national establishment of the type, according to SciDevNet. The bank was officially opened at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Kunming Institute of Botany in Yunnan Province on November 24.

The new bank holds over 30,000 species of wild seeds from Chinese plants, many of them on the brink of extinction, as well as DNA, microorganism samples and wild seeds from 21 foreign countries and the Kenya-based World Agroforestry Centre. The aim is to store up to 190,000 samples in the next 15 years.

The bank will be fully open to researchers, many of whom will be searching for the next important hybrid crop that can benefit the country, a redux of the hybrid rice varieties that raised the production of Chinese farmers in the 1970s.

"A country can be revitalised by a gene," Xue Dayuan, chief scientist for biodiversity conservation at the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Science, reports SciDevNet. "The germplasm bank will promote bio-resource research and identify more useful genes like hybrid rice."

Just as important, however, this seed bank means that many species that already exist and might have bit the dust will be preserved and hopefully brought back to health to benefit the world.

Photo courtesy of stock.xchng