But it had 10 sets of chromosomes that made it a genetic resource in its own right. The story was recounted in an e-mail sent around within the USDA.Īnalysis later showed that the Sakhalin strawberry was not the ancestor of the American variety. Service collaborated with the Russians to collect strawberry seeds from the volcano. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Lineage is important for crop lines because earlier versions of a seed may have a gene pool that could make them more adaptable in harsher climates. It was this taxonomist, Günter Staudt, who revealed the precise location It had originally been discovered by an intrepid Japanese explorer in 1929, and was named by a world-renowned German strawberry taxonomist in 1973. Rumored to be an ancestor of the American berry. After three days, he arrived at the Atsonupuri volcano, climbed a third of the way up the flank and found what he was looking for: the Fragaria iturupensis strawberry, Wilderness on the remote island of Sakhalin, Russia. Recently, Andrey Sabitov, a senior scientist at the Vavilov Research Institute in Russia, hiked into the bear-infested Scientists can go to extreme lengths to obtain wild species believed to have greater genetic diversity. ![]() And often, the wild relatives of domesticated crops show greater adaptability. ![]() The first defense is to save seeds that have traits "Diversity is a public good it belongs to everybody."Ĭlimate change is expected to negatively affect agriculture, with crops in parts of the world having to deal with warmer temperatures, droughts and rising salinity of water. "We are losing diversity in a very quiet way," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which partners with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden The vault, built into a Norwegian mountain near the North Pole, is the final defense for agriculture in the face of growing populations,Ī changing climate and rising threats to food security.Īnd the vault now contains the world's most diverse collection of crops as the shipment, which included a wild strawberry species painstakingly collected from a remote Russian archipelago, brought its numbers to more than It has been a long journey for the latest shipment of seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
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