![]() The next steps are to form several committees dedicated to outreach and philanthropy finalize the vault’s location, funding, technical issues improve education and international relations and other areas. In mid-June of this year, a feasibility study from two independent agencies, EvalueScience and Advocacy, found the proposal to be “of high significance and potential.” Dominguez-Bello sees the study’s completion as moving the project from the gestational to newborn phase. “I lived, in my own skin, how vulnerable our individual collections are,” she said.Īfter contacting the researchers involved in the Svalbard project, Dominguez-Bello started assembling scientists in her own field to look at the potential of creating a microbiota vault. She and her team had to go into the lab with headlamps to rescue the samples. In 2012, she moved to New York University, where, after only a month, Hurricane Sandy hit. Having worked in both her native Venezuela and Puerto Rico, Dominguez-Bello knows firsthand the hazards that political unrest and climate threats pose to sample collections. “By the time we know better– if we don’t preserve now, we won’t have it,” she said. Yet Dominguez-Bello is worries that as microbiota research matures, its practitioners might be losing out on valuable data from indigenous populations with more traditional lifestyles and diverse microbiota. While studies have shown that such differences exist, it’s not yet fully clear that these alterations are driving increases in chronic conditions, such as diabetes or heart disease. Diet, pollution, medication, sanitation, and other markers of urban environments could manifest these changes in the microorganisms. Some researchers are studying the ways in which the microbiota of people in industrial areas differ from those in rural or remote areas. Blaser on the 'Microbiota Vault'-Initiative And requesting the seeds’ return is a sign that the center is getting back on its feet, albeit away from home. By backing up its collection there, the center ensured that Syria’s civil war didn’t become "an extinction level event" for the ancient varieties of wheat and barley it cares for, Lainoff says. But the Svalbard system was created for moments just like this. Once the center has enough of a species to store, grow, and share its seeds, it will send some back to Svalbard, too. Scientists will grow and store the wild cousins of today’s crops in Lebanon, and everything else will go to its office in Morocco. The logistics of the delivery are being worked out, Lainoff says, but he expects the center to withdraw all of its samples from Svalbard over the course of a few years. The seeds stored at Svalbard are the freshest, and they’re already all in one place. “It’s like a safety deposit box in the bank,” explains Thomas Payne, head of the wheat collection at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center outside of Mexico City.Īmri told me back in April that between the center’s standard safety backups at the Mexican vault, the seeds that the center evacuated to Turkey and Lebanon, and those in Svalbard, "99.9 percent of its holdings are all outside Syria." If most of the collection is safe, why request the Svalbard seeds and open the doomsday vault? Each one has a specialty-the Aleppo bank focuses on crops that grow in dry areas-and each one has been sending back-up samples to Svalbard since it opened in 2008. It’s often called the “doomsday vault,” conjuring images of the sole survivors of a global disaster jumpstarting agriculture from scratch with the help of Svalbard’s frozen collection.īut Svalbard is just one part of a global network of seed banks, including the center based in Syria. The Svalbard vault’s job is to protect them from catastrophe, including nuclear war. These seeds are the product of 10,000 years or so of agriculture, history they hold in their genes. Now, its scientists hope to use the Svalbard samples to regenerate that collection outside of their war-torn home.īuilt beneath a mountain on an Arctic island halfway between Norway and the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault currently stores over 800,000 seed samples from 5,100 species of crops and their wild relatives. For many years, the center housed its own seed bank near Aleppo, Syria. This week the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas asked for the return of 325 little black boxes of seeds it had stored in the Svalbard vault. In the seven years since the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened, hundreds of thousands of seed samples have gone into its icy tombs.
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