"Noah's Ark" to protect plant diversity-plant seed bank

Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, October 8.
In the Arctic permafrost of Svalbard, Norway, in the Annan Mountains in the outer suburbs of Sydney, Australia, in the Wakehurst Botanic Garden in the south of the United Kingdom.
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there are several special "banks".
", its huge "treasury" stores green "wealth"-seeds
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Under the Arctic permafrost in Svalbard, Norway, there is an ice-covered cellar that stores more than 1 million "backup" samples of plant seeds, which are sourced from more than 200 countries and regions in the world
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There are thousands of large and small seed banks in the world, but these "safes" are not completely insured and suffer losses from time to time due to natural and man-made disasters
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Lisse Stefenson, executive director of the Nordic Gene Resource Center, said that the choice to build a seed bank in Svalbard is because it is located in a remote and polar region, the temperature is low enough, and there are convenient infrastructures such as airports
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In the Mount Annan area in the outer suburbs of Sydney, Australia, there is the largest "seed bank" in the southern hemisphere
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The seeds here are collected from all over Australia
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Experts from Australia's "Seed Bank" said that the bank has more than 400 seeds of endangered plants, and 10 of them have begun to be replanted in the wild
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The Kew Millennium Seed Bank in the United Kingdom was established in 2000 and is one of the largest seed banks in the world
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The Kew Millennium Seed Bank project collected 242,000 wild plant seeds from all over the world.
The wild plantain seeds from China became the 24,200 wild plant seeds stored by the institution in 2009, and “helped” this seed bank to complete a very One of the collection and storage goals
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The plant seeds sent to the Kew Millennium Seed Bank need to be dried first to reduce the humidity of the seeds to less than 5%
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Then the staff cleaned the seeds, and selected 50 seeds of each plant as samples, inspected their quality with radiation, and then cultivated in agar to check their germination ability
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After the inspection, the seeds will be put into glass bottles and stored in the basement at a temperature of minus 20 degrees Celsius
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Part of the seeds treated in this way can be stored for up to 200 years
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A large house in the northern part of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, where the seed bank of the Singapore Botanic Gardens is located, was opened in July 2019
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The seed bank is equipped with a seed cleaning laboratory, a drying room, a low temperature laboratory, etc.
, which can store up to 25,000 plant seeds, which is about half of the plant varieties in Southeast Asia
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At present, there are about 10,000 plant varieties in the Singapore Botanic Garden, and the seed bank has a larger capacity to store more varieties, thus building a protective barrier for plant species
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The first batch of seeds collected in the Singapore Botanic Garden Seed Bank included 14 varieties, 13 of which belonged to local varieties, and 1 came from Malaysia
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The goal is to harvest 100 batches of seeds every year, and collect 3 batches of different seeds for each plant species, each with about 10,000 seeds
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The seed bank not only collects seeds from local parks, nature reserves, and forests, but also exchanges seeds with foreign botanical gardens and research institutions
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In addition to collecting seeds, the Singapore Botanic Garden Seed Bank is committed to studying how to improve the preservation of tropical plant seeds, because the existing seed banks mostly focus on temperate plant seeds, and their cold storage methods may not be suitable for tropical plant seeds
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(Note holder: Li Wen; participating reporters: Liang Youchang, Zhang Shuhui, Hao Yalin, Wang Yanhong, Huang Kun, Wang Lili)