Seed banks aren’t doing enough to protect the wild relatives of our key food crops, says a new study out in the journal Nature Plants. An international team of researchers found that 95 percent of such wild relatives were “insufficiently represented” in the world’s 1,700 seed banks, which were established to preserve the genetics of our most important crops.
“There are very valid reasons why [wild plants] are under-represented in gene banks. They are difficult to collect, they are difficult to maintain, the collection and maintenance is expensive as well. Other things have had higher priority, such as cultivating material,” Luigi Guarino, director of science and programs at the Crop Trust, told the BBC. But with biodiversity under threat around the world, from development, deforestation and climate change (to name a few), Guarino stressed how important wild plants could be to the future of agriculture.
Domesticated crops “are just a selection from a much wider diversity of genes, traits and adaptations that are out there still in the ancestors and relatives of the crops we use today,” the BBC said. With advances in technology, scientists could tap those traits, breeding or splicing them into domestic varieties to create more resilient crops– assuming researchers can reach wild species in time. Earlier this year, FERN published a story with writer Lisa Hamilton and California Sunday Magazine on scientists braving the crocodile-infested swamps of Australia to find rice’s oldest wild relative.