Seeds hold hidden treasures for future food

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42066624

Seeds hold hidden treasures for future food

By Helen Briggs
BBC News

9 hours ago

From the section Science & Environment

More than 70,000 of the world's most precious seeds have been sent from the UK's Millennium Seed Bank to the Middle East, in its largest export to date. The consignment contains more than 50 wild relatives of cultivated crops, such as wheat, barley and lentils. The seeds will be used for food security research at a seed bank in Lebanon, which is recreating collections destroyed in Syria.

The Millennium Seed Bank at Kew is the world's largest wild plant seed bank. Seeds from the resilient, wild cousins of modern food crops are being collected and stored in an international effort. The aim is to breed new crop varieties capable of withstanding threats such as climate change, drought, pests and diseases.
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The seeds have been removed from stores at the Millennium Seed Bank and sent to the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (Icarda), in Lebanon. They include a wild wheat from Italy, a wild lentil plant from Cyprus, as well as wild relatives of the grass pea and faba beans. At Icarda, the seeds will be used for research into improving their domesticated relatives against current and future threats such as climate change.

Scientists at Icarda are re-building what was once the largest collection of seeds from across the region, including thousands of varieties of wheat, barley, lentils and fava (broadbean), which were kept at their former headquarters in Aleppo. Back-up samples held at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, deep inside a mountain in Norway, have helped to recreate the seed bank.

The seeds from Kew will give researchers access to precious material from wild crops, enabling the genes of living crops to be compared with their wild ''cousins''. ''These wild ones contain hidden treasures that might one day solve the threats crops are facing at the moment,'' Oriole Wagstaff added.
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