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Aug 19, 2008 5:21 pm US/Mountain
CSU Is Home To World's Largest Food Storage Site
FORT COLLINS, Colo. (CBS4) ―
A frozen, high-security library at Colorado State University may well hold the key to protecting the world's food supply in the future.
Fifty years ago researchers in Fort Collins began collecting plant seeds. The idea was breeders could use those seeds to create new plants that could weather diseases and droughts better.
The CSU campus is the home to the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, a federal facility. It's the largest in a worldwide network of plant and animal storage sites.
Consider a loaf of bread. If something hurts the wheat crop and the bread gets expensive, a single seed at the facility could give breeders the key to preventing that crop damage and saving the loaf of bread.
In the secure vault of the national storage center, the seeds and animal genes are kept in a freezer.
Dr. Dave Ellis is the curator at the center.
"What we have is a walk-in freezer, minus 18 degrees centigrade, 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and in this room you've got about 700,000 different samples of plant material," Ellis said to CBS4's Mike Hooker on a tour.
Bags of dried seeds are organized with barcodes.
Ellis says researchers in Fort Collins are aiming to keep the seeds alive for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to protect the food supply.
"There's a wheat rust that we're greatly afraid will come into the United States and were screening our collection of wheat," Ellis said. "We're talking 20,000 or 30,000 different samples of wheat to find if any of it is resistant."
Some seed varieties that seem useless today may provide drought tolerance, or insect resistance a hundred years from now.
In the liquid nitrogen storage facility, researchers store genetic material from nearly half a million individual animals. Liquid nitrogen keeps the samples frozen but still alive for researchers to study as they work to protect and improve the world's food supply.
A lot of the seeds and samples are sent out to breeders and researchers, but the gene bank also stores backup collections for banks that might be at risk. For instance, the site has backup for the bank in the Republic of Georgia in case fighting there destroys their collection.
They are also backing up the entire collection, 115,000 samples, from the International Rice Center in the Philippines to protect the seeds from typhoon flooding.
The seed and animal storage bank also holds samples of microbes, insects and fish.
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