A new gene bank in Colombia will provide an expanded home for the world’s largest collection of beans, cassava, and tropical forage grasses, which breeders use to create better performing and climate-resistant crops.
opened in 2008—its stark concrete entrance jutting from a frozen Norwegian island—it became an icon of the vital mission of gene banks to preserve crop diversity. Now, a new gene bank in the tropics could make a similar mark, with an equally distinctive design and an urgent research agenda. Last week, researchers and officials dedicatedin Palmira, Colombia, with a high metal canopy intended to evoke a forest.
The new building, called Future Seeds, replaces a decades-old facility in Cali, Colombia, that was once a meat quality lab and slaughterhouse. It boosts storage capacity for the gene bank’s current target plants by nearly one-third, and ultimately could store additional kinds of crops as well. It now holds about 67,000 samples—known as germplasm—of crop varieties or populations, many of them no longer cultivated.
The bank also holds some 6000 tissue samples from cassava, a starchy tuber that is a major staple in Latin America and Africa. Cassava takes more work to conserve because it cannot be stored as seed. Instead, the plants must be regenerated as a clonal organisms, such as potatoes, from plantlets growing in sterile test tubes.
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