What Is a Seed Bank?

A Hype Seeds(also known as a gene bank) preserves genetic diversity of crops and species, and offers resources for plant breeders to produce stronger crop varieties that can better resist drought, disease, climate change and other factors. It also helps preserve food solutions in times of disaster.

Almost all biological entities generate seed banks, and the largest are found in plants. Seed banks are reservoirs of metabolically inactive individuals that collectively contain genetic, phenotypic and functional diversity. The dynamic processes that govern the accumulation, maintenance and disintegration of seed banks have emerged as important to biological systems, affecting patterns and behavior from micro-scale biofilms to global ecosystems.

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For example, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, often described as a Noah’s Ark of seeds, seeks to store duplicates of all seeds stored in other seed banks around the world in case of a catastrophic event. It also serves as a research tool, and has been used to help fend off a wheat aphid infestation by providing researchers with a couple of samples that were resistant to the pest.

However, increased climate variability threatens the function of some of the world’s seed banks. Many are housed in permafrost, and with climate change thawing and melting the permafrost, the seeds they contain could be lost forever. Agricultural Genetic Resources Preservation Research, a U.S.-based organization headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado, oversees the national seed collection and houses the largest repository of wild-plant genetics under one roof. It stores more than 500,000 samples of genetic material from 12,000 distinct species and distributes them to scientists to support research and education.

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