Photo: Ousa Chea | Unsplash
Future Seeds, the world’s largest repository for beans, cassava, and tropical forages, opened this week near Cali, Colombia. With the climate crisis making conditions difficult and unpredictable, crops need to be resilient. Future Seeds not only collects and stores seeds, but also uses AI to identify regions of the plants’ genome that may be linked to traits such as drought tolerance or pest resistance. “The collections are of global importance and this new facility will greatly increase the possibilities for improving the crops held,” said Elinor Breman, a senior research leader at the Millennium Seed Bank in the UK. Half of the hundred employees at Future Seeds work in the surrounding test fields growing plants and collecting new material, since collections in the vaults must be regularly updated with fresh, viable samples.
|
|
More:
