Storage of wild seeds is research you can bank on
The Germplasm Bank of Wild Species in southwestern China's Yunnan Province has 10,601 species of seeds.
Like the UK's Millennium Seed Bank and Norway's Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in the northern countryside of Yunnan's Kunming, there's a plant gene bank with more than 10,000 species of seeds.
The Germplasm Bank of Wild Species has been dubbed China's "Noah's Ark" for plants.
"Through the drying and low temperature storage, the longevity of most of the seeds can be vastly extended," Zhang Ting, a researcher with the Germplasm Bank, told Shanghai Daily.
"Different species have different longevity and the average is 200 years. But the seed aging experiments in seed biology show that seeds of plants like rice, corn and cotton can live for a thousand of years under the conditions of our bank."
A researcher with the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species checks the seeds which are stored at low temperatures.
Yunnan Province, which only occupies 4.1 percent of the land in China, has almost all ecosystem types on the earth except for marine and desert ecosystems.
And it's rich in biodiversity. There are more than 25,000 species belonging to 11 biological groups in Yunnan.
However, most of the species there are characterized by narrow geographical distribution and small population size. So how to save rare species has become a priority for the researchers.
In 1999, Chinese botanist Wu Zhengyi, honorary director of the Kunming Institute of Botany under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, proposed that a germplasm bank of wild species should be established as soon as possible. Five years later, the bank started construction, and it opened in 2007.
Seeds undergo processes like drying and cleaning before being put in containers and taken to the freezer at minus 20 Celsius degrees for storage.
On a wall of the Seed Museum at the Fuligong Greenhouses in Kunming Botanical Garden, there is a saying from Wu – "a single gene could change the fate of a nation. A single seed could change the future of a people." Another wall is made of 2,040 transparent acrylic cubes with 522 species of seeds inside.
"The number is to commemorate the International Day for Biological Diversity, which falls on May 22," said Zhang. "Most of the seeds displayed here are collected by us from the wild. But you can still find some seeds of crops, such as corn and bean."
According to Zhang, China has more than 37,000 species of plants but not all of them have seeds.
"Only angiosperm and gymnosperm can bear seeds, which can be considered simply as blooming vegetation. There are over 29,000 species of blooming vegetation in the country and we have 10,601 of them in our plant gene bank, which accounts for about 36 percent."
A wall at the Seed Museum is made of 2,040 transparent acrylic cubes with 522 species of seeds inside.
Zhang said they are continuing to collect more seeds.
"But that doesn't mean that we will collect all of them," Zhang said. "We'll first get the worthier ones back, such as the rare and endangered ones and those worth scientific research or with important economic value.
The collecting work could be really tough. Recently, a group of seeds collected from areas at an altitude of 6,200 meters on Mount Qomolangma was delivered to the germplasm bank.
Due to reasons like the extreme cold and lack of oxygen, the areas at high altitude on Mount Qomolangma are seen as a no man's land.
Prior to that, the highest place the seed collecting team worked at was scrub at an altitude of 5,559 meters in Tibet.
After a three-year preparation, the team headed to Mount Qomolangma twice in August and September this year and spent more than 20 days there. Between August 15 and 28, they completed the first collecting task at an altitude of 5,738 meters. On September 24, eight team members climbed the mountain again and set the record with an altitude of 6,200 meters.
The germplasm bank launched a project on collecting plant seeds at the world's highest altitude in August.
