Seed Banks / Seed Vaults

[WhistlingJack]

NOTE: The Svalbard (Norwegian) international seed vault is discussed in its own dedicated thread:

Svalbard Global Seed Vault ("Doomsday Vault" For Seeds; Norway)
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...-vault-doomsday-vault-for-seeds-norway.24937/

Plant vault passes billion mark

By Richard Black

Environment correspondent, BBC News website

Britain's "Noah's Ark" for plants has just collected its billionth seed.

The Millennium Seed Bank will present the seed, from an African bamboo, to Chancellor Gordon Brown, as it seeks funds to continue operating after 2010.

Part of the Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG) at Kew, the bank already stores material from 18,000 species, some of which have become extinct in the wild.

Seed banks are seen as an essential part of plans to curb the rapid loss of biodiversity, in Britain and worldwide.

By 2010, Kew plans to have amassed seeds from 30,000 species, representing 10% of the world's plants.

"Now we're starting to think about where we go beyond 2010," the project's head Paul Smith told the BBC News website.

"And we want to get to 25% of species stored away by 2020. If policymakers are serious about funding adaptation to climate change, seed banks are a key part of that."

Seeds are collected by Kew's partner organisations around the world and sent to the RBG site at Wakehurst Place in Sussex.

They come from all over the globe, although British varieties are particularly well represented, with seeds from 88% of its native flora sequestered away.

Most of the seeds can be preserved by careful drying, after which they are stored at minus 20C. A few need more specialised, tailor-made treatment.

Some will last like this for millennia, others for decades; these will be planted and germinated before their expiry date comes up, and the seed of their offspring collected and stored anew.

But the idea is not to hide them away for ever. Where species have gone extinct, or are teetering on the edge, Kew's stores are used to replenish wild populations.

One British example is strapwort (Corrigiola litoralis) , a critically endangered native of southwest England now found on only one nature reserve, which Kew's stocks are helping to keep alive.

The billionth seed comes from the African bamboo species Oxytenanthera abyssinica, a plant used in Mali and other West African countries for building, furniture, and wine-making.

Its presentation to Mr Brown is aimed at persuading the Chancellor and prospective Prime Minister to continue funding the Millennium Seed Bank after 2010.

It is a key year in conservation, marking the target date by which, under the UN biodiversity convention, the world's governments are pledged to have halted and begun to reverse the seemingly inexorable biodiversity decline.

"Scientists are always asking for money," conceded Dr Smith. "But what makes us different is that we have a proven methodology here, we have the network and we know how to do what we do.

"This costs about £2,000 ($4,000) per species; so to collect a quarter of what's out there would cost about £100m ($200m).

"With threats not only from climate change but also deforestation, changes in land use and so on, seed-banking is the bare minimum."

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Story from BBC NEWS:

Published: 2007/04/26 01:36:29 GMT

© BBC MMVII

 

[ramonmercado]

And the banana slips it past the 10% mark.

Banana marks seed bank milestone
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8305456.stm
By Rebecca Morelle
Science reporter, BBC News



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From field to freezer: the journey of a seed bank seed

An international seed bank has reached its target of collecting 10% of the world's wild plants, with seeds of a pink banana among its latest entries.

The wild banana, Musa itinerans, is a favourite of wild Asian elephants.

Seeds from the plant, which is under threat from agriculture, join 1.7 billion already stored by Kew's Millennium Seed Bank partnership.

The project has been described as an "insurance strategy" against future biodiversity losses.



A wild banana has been chosen as a flagship species
The seed bank partnership, which involves more than 120 organisations in 54 countries, is now aiming to collect and conserve seeds from a quarter of the Earth's flowering plant species by 2020.

All the seeds are kept both in their country of origin and in Royal Botanic Gardens Kew's premises at Wakehurst Place, West Sussex, where they are stored in underground vaults that are kept at -20C.

The plant material is dried, cleaned and sorted, ensuring only the finest specimens make it into the giant freezers. There, the cold and arid conditions keep the seeds in pristine condition for anywhere between a few years to thousands of years, depending on the species.


The seeds are painstakingly cleaned and sorted
The aim is that each seed stored in the bank can be regrown, should the need arise.

The wild banana plant from China was selected as the "10% species" by the bank's international collaborators because it fulfilled a number of conservation criteria.

Janet Terry, the seed processing manager at the bank, said: "It was chosen because it is representative of what the whole project is all about - it is endemic, endangered and it is an economic species.

"And of course, everybody loves a banana."

Musa itinerans becomes the 24,200th species to have been stored in the seed bank.




Bank on seeds - the world's buffer
The 10% target was set when the Wakehurst Place facility was completed in 2000.

At that time, it was estimated that there were 242,000 plant species in the world, although more recently it is thought that there might be 300,000.

Professor Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, told BBC News: "In the next phase, we want to secure another 15%, so by 2020 we will have a quarter of the world's seeds banked in both the country of origin and Wakehurst Place.

"And a major focus is going to be a considerable expansion in the sustainable use of seeds for human benefit."

The researchers will be focusing on food security, biodiversity loss and climate change.

Professor Hopper added: "The thing that has changed over this 10-year period is a much more acute awareness of climate change as a threatening process, as well as the many others that impact on plant life.

"And the seed bank, as an insurance strategy, is a good sensible way of keeping your options open for the future."

 

[rynner2]

But there are also natural seed banks:

Ancient plants back to life after 30,000 frozen years
By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News

Scientists in Russia have grown plants from fruit stored away in permafrost by squirrels over 30,000 years ago.
The fruit was found in the banks of the Kolmya River in Siberia, a top site for people looking for mammoth bones.

The Institute of Cell Biophysics team raised plants of Silene stenophylla - of the campion family - from the fruit.
Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they note this is the oldest plant material by far to have been brought to life.
Prior to this, the record lay with date palm seeds stored for 2,000 years at Masada in Israel.

The leader of the research team, Professor David Gilichinsky, died a few days before his paper was published.
In it, he and his colleagues describe finding about 70 squirrel hibernation burrows in the river bank.
"All burrows were found at depths of 20-40m from the present day surface and located in layers containing bones of large mammals such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, horse, deer, and other representatives of fauna from the age of mammoths, as well as plant remains," they write.

"The presence of vertical ice wedges demonstrates that it has been continuously frozen and never thawed.
"Accordingly, the fossil burrows and their content have never been defrosted since burial and simultaneous freezing."

The squirrels appear to have stashed their store in the coldest part of their burrow, which subsequently froze permanently, presumably due to a cooling of the local climate.

Back in the lab, near Moscow, the team's attempts to germinate mature seeds failed.
Eventually they found success using elements of the fruit itself, which they refer to as "placental tissue" and propagated in laboratory dishes.

"This is by far the most extraordinary example of extreme longevity for material from higher plants," commented Robin Probert, head of conservation and technology at the UK's Millennium Seed Bank.
"I'm not surprised that it's been possible to find living material as old as this, and this is exactly where we would go looking, in permafrost and these fossilised rodent burrows with their caches of seeds.
"But it is a surprise to me that they're finding viable material from this placental tissue rather than mature seeds."

The Russian team's theory is that the tissue cells are full of sucrose that would have formed food for the growing plants.
Sugars are preservatives; they are even being researched as a way of keeping vaccines fresh in the hot climates of Africa without the need for refrigeration.
So it may be that the sugar-rich cells were able to survive in a potentially viable state for so long.

Silene stenophylla still grows on the Siberian tundra; and when the researchers compared modern-day plants against their resurrected cousins, they found subtle differences in the shape of petals and the sex of flowers, for reasons that are not evident.

The scientists suggest in their PNAS paper that research of this kind can help in studies of evolution, and shed light on environmental conditions in past millennia.
But perhaps the most enticing suggestion is that it might be possible, using the same techniques, to raise plants that are now extinct - provided that Arctic ground squirrels or some other creatures secreted away the fruit and seeds.

"We'd predict that seeds would stay viable for thousands, possibly tens of thousands of years - I don't think anyone would expect hundreds of thousands of years," said Dr Probert.
"[So] there is an opportunity to resurrect flowering plants that have gone extinct in the same way that we talk about bringing mammoths back to life, the Jurassic Park kind of idea."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17100574

 

[ramonmercado]

Another natural seed bank.

Researchers have successfully grown dates from 2000-year-old seeds recovered from an ancient fortress and caves in the Middle East. The find reveals how ancient farmers were selectively breeding dates from around the region, and it could give clues to how dates can survive for millennia.

“This is an astonishing result,” says Robin Allaby, a geneticist at the University of Warwick who was not part of the research team. “It shines a light on the fact that we don’t understand long-term seed viability.”

To grow the date plants, Sarah Sallon, an ethnobotanist at the Hadassah Medical Center, and colleagues sorted through hundreds of seeds. Some were excavated from Masada, Israel—a mountaintop fortress on a plateau overlooking the Dead Sea that was partly built by the biblical King Herod; others came from caves around the Dead Sea used for storage and living quarters.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/dead-sea-dates-grown-2000-year-old-seeds