Kunming stores 1,200 seed varieties from 40 countries

353 shares of backup seeds from the British Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank arrived in Kunming recently, adding the share number of seeds stored in Kunming up to nearly 1,200.

The backup seeds are collected from more than 40 countries, and they will be kept at minus 20 ℃ in the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species.

Located at the Kunming Institute of Botany, the germplasm bank passed national acceptance check in Nov. 2009. And it is the world’s second seed bank for wild plants after Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank.

Qin Shaofa, a staff of Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has begun to check in the new arrivals of seeds.

Qin will first verify the consistency among specimens, seeds and their data.
The seeds that passed a physical checkup will be sent to the initial drying room where the relative humidity and temperature remain 15% and 15℃.

The healthy seeds will be re-dried again until their moisture content rate is reduced to around 3% to 7%.

“The last step is to sub-pack the seeds and store them in specific sub-banks,” said another staff.

The seeds will be packed in bottles, labeled with a bar code, and sent to frozen vaults.

Each pack of seeds will be stored in the flexible bank and the fixed bank respectively, with the former for research purposes and the latter for permanent backup storage.

Every few years, some seeds are taken from the flexible bank for germination experiments to see if they are still alive and to determine the timing for the next germination.

Editor: Eric Wang