Unit 3.12, Exercise 4, page 95.0:01
The Millennium Seed Bank.0:07
Every living creature depends on plants to survive.0:09
Plants are the basis of the ecosystems in which animals live and grow.0:14
Plants provide human beings with food, materials, and medicines.0:20
Environmentally, plant plants are essential for renewing oxygen levels and protecting us from floods and drought.0:25
Plants also play an important role in culture and art.0:33
The world's plant life, however, is under threat.0:38
Every plant requires certain conditions in order to grow.0:43
Climate change and human exploitation are rapidly reducing the areas of the world where such conditions are present.0:47
Many unique and useful wild plants are struggling to survive because tougher foreign species have been brought into their habitats.0:57
In fact, experts predict that up to half of the world's plant species could be extinct by 2080.1:07
It was in response to this that the Kew Gardens Millennium Seed bank was set up in 2000 in Sussex, England.1:17
The project aims to gather and maintain samples of seeds from wild plants all around the world to ensure against their extinction.1:26
The collection is kept alive by periodically germinating the seeds to produce new samples.1:37
The total number of seeds collected reached 2 billion in 2015.1:44
Yet the directors are the first to admit that simply collecting seeds is not enough.1:52
Even if a plant becomes extinct in the wild.1:58
The reasons behind this loss would have to be dealt with before the project could successfully reintroduce the plant into the wild.2:02
The vavilov Institute in 2002, the United States was hit by a near disaster.2:11
Its soybean crop had been devastated by a parasite called cyst nematode.2:20
At that time, there were no soybean seeds in the United States that were resistant to this destructive little worm.2:27
Luckily for the American soybean industry, a Russian seed bank in St Petersburg, the Vavilov Institute, had just what the American scientists had been looking for in the form of a cyst resistant soybean seed.2:35
What is now known as the Vavilov Institute was established in 1894 and is the world's first and oldest seed bank.2:52
The Institute gained a worldwide reputation under the directorship of the plant geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, who built up the seed bank into the world's largest repository of plant genetic material and developed it as a leading scientific research centre into3:02
plant genetics in the 1930s.3:21
The remarkable Vavilov spent two decades scouring some of the most inhospitable terrains in the world in order to bring seeds to St Petersburg from such diverse places as Ethiopia, Afghanistan and the Americas.3:25
He and his team added a quarter of a million entries to Soviet seed collections, a feat that no other person has come even close to matching.3:42
Today, the collection in St. Petersburg totals 380,000 gene types, representing 2,500 different plant species.3:54
This collection and those of other seed banks around the world are of major importance because they allow scientists to create higher yielding and disease resistant crops.4:06
Without the gene diversity available from seed banks such as the Vavilof Institute, the world's crops would be at greater risk from disease and the human population at greater risk of starvation.4:19
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