The International Potato Center (CIP) has recently joined 34 other organizations around the world that have contributed over 60 seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Repository, a biodiversity bunker on a mountainous Arctic island in Norway.
This massive seed storage of many crops has helped increase the number of samples stored on Svalbard to more than one million, but for the CIP Gene Bank, this was just the last such supply in a constant effort to back up its vast collections of potatoes. , sweet potatoes, Andean roots and tubers and wild relatives of these crops.
“This is an insurance policy for the future of humanity, ensuring that these seeds exist somewhere, in case something goes wrong, both here and in the world,” said Noel Anglin, head of the CIP genebank and leader of biodiversity. CIP for a future program. She noted that over the years, Lima, Peru, where the CIP genebank is located, was hit by earthquakes, while parts of the city were flooded in 2017.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault provides permanent back-up storage at -18 ° C for seeds from the world's genebanks. NordGen - the organization that operates the seed storage facility in coordination with the Crop Trust and the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food - uses a black box system, which means that only contributors can touch or collect their seeds. While genebanks regularly share their proceeds with other organizations, the seed vault is solely for storage.
Gene banks hold an extensive sample of agricultural biodiversity in the world, most of which is threatened by environmental degradation, extreme weather conditions, and the global trend of farmers moving from traditional to modern varieties.
However, some ancient varieties and their wild relatives have characteristics that breeders can use to create sustainable varieties that farmers will need to cope with the future climate, which makes gene banks more and more important.
The recent storage of CIP of 236 samples of sweet potato seeds and wild relatives of several crops was added to the 9 seed samples that CIP had previously sent to Svalbard. However, Svalbard is just one of several places where the CIP genebank backs up its collections.
The CIP genebank holds over 4800 potato specimens - from rare Native American potatoes to internationally grown varieties - and over 5500 sweet potato specimens such as in vitro seedlings. However, the Svalbard facility only stores seeds, so CIP can only store part of its collections there, primarily the wild relatives of potatoes and sweet potatoes.
CIP maintains its in vitro potato collection with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) and its in vitro sweet potato collection at the International Tropical Agriculture Center (CIAT), Colombia. CIP reciprocates by backing up the CIAT cassava collection in vitro. All these backups are black boxes, like deposits on Svalbard. Most of the collections of potatoes, sweet potatoes and Andean root crops and CIP tubers are also stored at the Center's research station in Huancayo, in the Peruvian Andes.
CIP also backed up 3277 potato samples using cryopreservation, in which plant tissue is stored in liquid nitrogen at -196 ° C. Cryopreservation is a cost-effective long-term option for preserving potato biodiversity, but the CIP cryopreservation collection is currently stored only in its genebank Lima. Thus, Anglin is exploring options for supporting it elsewhere.