A UK-Chinese collaboration has sequenced the DNA of all the 827 kinds of wheat, assembled by Watkins, that have been nurtured at the John Innes Centre near Norwich for most of the past century.
In doing so, scientists have created a genetic goldmine by pinpointing previously unknown genes that are now being used to create hardy varieties with improved yields that could help feed Earth’s swelling population.
Strains are now being developed that include wheat which is able to grow in salty soil, while researchers at Punjab Agricultural University are working to improve disease resistance from seeds that they received from the John Innes Centre. Other strains include those that would reduce the need for nitrogen fertilisers, the manufacture of which is a major source of carbon emissions.
“Essentially we have uncovered a goldmine,” said Simon Griffiths, a geneticist at the John Innes Centre and one of the project’s leaders.
“This is going to make an enormous difference to our ability to feed the world as it gets hotter and agriculture comes under increasing climatic strain.”
If some obsessive, one individual, hadn’t collected these seeds, then an institution had kept them safe, we’d be a lot more likely to starve in the future.
The most bio-diverse land ecosystem are rainforests, and we’re cutting them down, destroying entire ecosystems. Destroying ecosystems is like burning your house to save on heating bills. Leaving aside all the climate change issues, and that collapsing ecosystems may lead to collapse of life support for humans, each animal, plant, microbe or insect we make extinct has the potential to have genes which could lead to scientific advances: not just in food crops but in medicine and if we don’t have civilization collapse, for gene therapies and enhancements of incalculable value to humanity.
Increased longevity, faster healing, improved immune systems, greater heat or cold tolerance and far, far more could be lost because of this short sightedness.
It took billions of years to create such a diverse web of life, and on the human scale, once it’s gone, it’s gone and we aren’t getting it back.
We should either stop (we aren’t going to) or at the least preserve samples of everything we can, in vaults designed to run for at least centuries with minimal human support and without requiring more than simple maintenance. If we’re young enough, the lives we save might be our own, if not our grandchildren and later descendants will thank us, and, just perhaps, we might may be able to bring back to life some of the species we are currently genociding.