ARS is sending more
than 20,000 seeds from different crop samples to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault
in Norway. Photo courtesy of Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity
Trust. |
|
The entrance to the
Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is located midway between Norway and the
North Pole and provides a backup to germplasm banks around the world, rises out
of the snow like a fin. Photo courtesy of Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity
Trust. |
ARS Ships More Seeds to Genebank Facility in
Norway
By Jan
Suszkiw February 19, 2009
The Agricultural Research
Service (ARS) this month shipped some precious cargo to Norway: seeds from
20,000 different crop samples maintained by the agency's
National Plant Germplasm System
(NPGS).
The shipments--to Norway's Svalbard Global
Seed Vault--serve a two-fold purpose, according to ARS plant physiologist
David
Ellis. The first is to ensure the safekeeping of duplicate copies of seeds
already maintained in the NPGS, which contains more than 500,000 accessions of
cultivated plants and their wild relatives.
The second purpose is to help promote world food security by adding to
the genetic diversity of crops whose seeds are now stored in the vault, or will
be. These include aroids, maize, banana, cassava, carrot, finger millet and
sunflower.
This month's shipment, the second by ARS since January 2008, contains
pepper, lettuce, pea, rice, flax, sorghum, wheat and safflower seeds. Over the
next 10 to 15 years, it's hoped that seeds from almost all of the 500,000 NPGS
accessions will be represented in the vault, according to Ellis, curator of the
plant collection at the ARS
National
Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colo.
The vault's entrance resembles a fin protruding from the side of a
mountain on one of a group of Svalbard islands, located midway between Norway
and the North Pole. The vault's three storage chambers are nestled in
permafrost deep inside the mountain, which helps preserve the seeds.
The vault, which was built to store 2 billion seeds and celebrates its
one-year anniversary on February 26, is administered by the Nordic Genetic
Resources Center for the Norwegian government in partnership with
The Global Crop Diversity Trust.
The Trust was co-founded by the United Nation's Food and Agricultural Organization and
Bioversity International.
About 1,400 genebanks are operated worldwide. But the vault isn't
meant to replace them. Rather, it provides a backup in the event that
seeds--and the genetic diversity encoded with them--are lost to equipment
failures, mismanagement, budgetary cuts, natural disasters and other
catastrophes.
ARS is the principal intramural scientific research agency of the
U.S. Department of Agriculture.