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Kew Gardens has banked 10 per cent of the world's seeds with pink banana from China - Printable Version

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Kew Gardens has banked 10 per cent of the world's seeds with pink banana from China - forwardone - 10-15-2009 11:35 AM

The wild forest banana, Musa itinerans, is an important food for wild Asian elephants and a relative to commercial species, which could provide a resource for breeding new disease-resistant varieties for cultivation of the fruit.

Seeds from the plant, which is increasingly under threat as its jungle habitat is cleared for agriculture, will join more than 3.5 billion which have been collected and stored in seed banks in their country of origin and in Kew's state-of-the-art facility at Wakehurst Place, West Sussex.

The Kew Millennium Seed Bank partnership has met the 10 per cent target, which was set when the Wakehurst Place seed bank was completed in 2000, in the world famous botanic gardens' 250th anniversary year.

The partnership, which involves more than 120 organisations in 54 countries, is now focusing on a new target - to collect and conserve a quarter of the Earth's flowering plant species by 2020.

The majority of the species collected will survive for hundreds of years in the sterile, cool conditions of the seed bank, and some will survive for millennia, protecting the plants against the risk of global extinction.

But the facility at Kew is more than simply a "doomsday vault" to maintain stores of plants, with the next decade of the project focusing on supporting conservation and tackling threats such as food security and climate change.

Collected seeds will be available for scientific research into uses of plants including drought resistant crops, medicines and energy sources and for restoration of damaged vegetation.

It is hoped efforts to restore damaged areas of vegetation can help address the destruction of forests around the world that accounts for almost a fifth of global carbon emissions.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6327856/Kew-Gardens-has-banked-10-per-cent-of-the-worlds-seeds-with-pink-banana-from-China.html