When the Svalbard Global Seed Vault 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 dedicated a $17 million gene bank facility in Palmira, Colombia, with a high metal canopy intended to evoke a forest. It 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.
“It’s really fantastic,” says Theo van Hintum, head of the plant gene bank at Wageningen University & Research’s Centre for Genetic Resources. “It shows that we as a world community are willing to invest in conserving genetic diversity and keeping it available for future generations.”
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. Most of these are stored as seeds at –20°C, including nearly 38,000 samples of beans and almost 23,000 samples of tropical forage legumes and grasses that are grown in pastures for livestock.
To build the new facility, the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture received about $6 million in funding from the Colombian government, the United Kingdom, and others. Planners wanted to create a structure that would be both an architectural landmark and environmentally sustainable, says gene bank manager Peter Wenzl. Its wavy metal canopy, up to 15 meters high, keeps the buildings cooler and collects rainwater, and nearby solar panels provide more than enough electricity.
A large open office area will host visiting scientists, including partners from national gene banks. “You feel a certain calmness and peace that allows you to focus and be creative,” Wenzl says. And the high ceiling, he adds, makes it “feel like a germplasm cathedral.”
Last week, the Bezos Earth Fund awarded $17 million to Future Seeds, shortly after a visit by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The grant will help fund the conservation and breeding of tropical forage grasses with deep roots for sequestrating carbon in soil. One candidate is already preserved in the collection: a grass named Brachiaria humidicola. It has an additional climate benefit, because it exudes compounds that prevent soil microbes from converting ammonium ions into potent greenhouse gases.
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. The new bank has facilities that will make it easier for technicians to process and store plant tissues free of diseases, van Hintum says, making cassava conservation more reliable.
“It’s a major value addition to the entire cassava community across the globe,” says Robert Kawuki, a cassava breeder at the National Crops Resources Research Institute in Uganda. “It can secure the future of cassava.”
A new genomics lab, meanwhile, will allow the alliance to ramp up its genotyping of stored samples, yielding data that can flag duplicate samples and show whether varieties present in other gene banks are missing from the collection. The larger goal of genotyping is to help breeders more easily identify varieties with useful traits, such as drought tolerance and disease resistance. “That will help decide what germplasm is worthwhile to look at because the collection is so big,” says Karen Cichy, a plant geneticist and bean breeder with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “It’s really helpful.”
Wenzl hopes the building, which will also be open to visitors from schools and the general public, will also inspire the next generation of plant breeders and gene bank curators. Cichy agrees: “It looks absolutely beautiful. That could really make people appreciate that this is something valuable.”