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For more than a decade, workers at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry had been gathering seeds from all over the world and carefully preserving them in a locked vault. They believed they held the raw materials to allow scientists to breed the super plants of the future, crops that could survive anything nature could throw at them.
The Institute’s founder, Nikolai Vavilov, had spent years collecting rare and wild relatives of wheat, rye and other staples so crop breeders could mine their hardy genes. Now the Nazis had laid siege to Leningrad (now St Petersburg), preventing the institute’s workers from leaving the city. So the botanists barricaded themselves in with the stash, preparing to defend it from rats, freezing weather and desperately hungry citizens.
Lesser scientists would have eaten the precious packs of rice, wheat, peas, oats and potatoes during the 28-month siege. Instead, Dmitri S Ivanov, the head of the rice collection, a bespectacled man with fine, side-parted hair, painstakingly conserved several thousand packs of rice while gradually succumbing to malnutrition.
Eight of his colleagues also died of cold and hunger while protecting their specimens, some of which they managed to smuggle to safety in the mountains. Many precious plant varieties survived, going on to breed crops that would later feed millions of people.
Today, the botanists’ mission lives on in a vast international network of genetic safe houses. Seed collectors are criss-crossing the globe in vans and airplanes, racing to collect as many ancient strains as possible and store them before they go extinct. This time, however, they are looking for plants that can survive climate change. And even today, the safe houses are not as secure as they might be.
Recently two New Zealand seed hunters drove matching white vans along treacherous roads in the remote reaches of Russia’s Altai mountains, near the Mongolian border. Working with staff from the Vavilov Institute, the New Zealanders sought and plucked ancient variants of grasses – long-lost relatives of crops that farmers today use to feed millions of people and farm animals. Working their way around a map of known hotspots of biodiversity, they would first find a promising specimen, then identify it using a reference volume, then carefully pluck a handful of seeds and slide them into an envelope.
After sharing varieties with their friends from St Petersburg, the New Zealanders flew with their precious cargo back to the Margot Forde germplasm centre in Palmerston North, a city two hours’ drive from Wellington. There, they breed their haul inside a secure, mesh-ringed garden until they have at least 100 seeds of each species, enough to maintain healthy genetic diversity.
The whole operation is simultaneously expert and humble to observe. When a crop needs to be pollinated by insects, a technician is assigned to catch a wild bumblebee. The technician painstakingly washes the presumably bemused bee with a damp cotton buds to remove all traces of outside pollen, before releasing the bee inside the mesh.
Later the collectors brush, dry and store their seeds in a secure, low-humidity chiller. From there, they will send a sample to any researcher who wants to study it, or to any gene bank in the world. If a variety later goes extinct in its homeland, the hunters will return a selection of seeds.
Seed hunters are particularly interested in finding strains that live in arid, harsh, or deluged places, because they may be able to share genes that help crops weather the climate of the future. The explorers visit parts of China, Morocco, Tunisia, Kazakhstan – anywhere they can gain permission to visit that harbours biodiversity.
Much of what they find would be a crushing disappointment to a starving botanist, should they crumble and decide to eat any of it. Some of the most-coveted varieties are inedible, the bitter wild relatives of important staples such as wheat and maize. These wild cousins remain closely enough related to allow them to interbreed with more delicious toast and taco-producing variants.
Many of our domesticated crops have grown spoiled over the years, says Kioumars Ghamkhar, an Iranian-born plant geneticist who heads the Margot Forde gene bank. Over the centuries, farmers have selected crops that were very productive, sweet-to-taste, or easy-to-peel, sacrificing other traits in the process.
The food we eat is the pampered offspring of many successive generations of plants, each of which was plied with plentiful water, nutrients and pest-control, he says. “It is like they are living in a five-star hotel,” says Ghamkar. Seed scouts reach back into prehistory to recover the lost “tough” genes.
“We go and collect in the footsteps of evolution,” says Ghamkar. “In the mountains of Azerbaijan there is no five-star hotel, so the plants are living in a hostile environment. When you cross-breed them, you bring back the resistance and persistence genes, and that is what you need when the climate starts to change.”
Now scientists and governments all over the world agree that people need a vast and deep array of plant genes to protect themselves from hunger. Recently an Israeli wild wheat turned out to be very high in protein, while a South American potato yielded a gene that seems to help potatoes resist blight. Other wild strains have extra-deep roots or thrive on much less water. Read more..
Source: BBC
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