DR PAUL WILLIS:
Everybody knows seeds are important — no seeds, no plants. But the fate of seeds has become even more important because of pressures from climate change, shrinking biodiversity and loss of habitat. In fact, seeds are now so precious that the concept of seed banking is a fundamental investment in our future.
LEAHWYN SEED:
Plants are really important for the health of the planet and, by collecting seeds, we're able to store a lot of genetic diversity and some of that huge variety of plants that we have. And we're able to keep that in a really small amount of space for a long time, as a good resource that we have for the future.
DR PAUL WILLIS:
The New South Wales Seedbank at Mount Annan Botanic Garden houses seeds from nearly 9,000 plant species. These students from Sydney Girls High Astronomy Club are here to find out more about seed conservation.
LEAHWYN SEED:
So this is our storage facility, and you can see all the seeds are filed away in these little packets.
DR PAUL WILLIS:
Samples of all the seeds here are also sent over to the Millennium Seed Bank Project in England.
LEAHWYN SEED:
And that means there's a duplicated collection, and that's a good risk management strategy in case anything happens to one or the other collections that we can keep these seeds for a long time.
DR PAUL WILLIS:
The British are aiming to have banked seed from 10% of the world's wild plant species by the end of the decade. The world's most spectacular new seed storage facility is at Svalbard. The Global Seed Vault, or Doomsday Vault, is built deep into the side of a mountain on a Norwegian island near the North Pole. It will have the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples, including many from Australia.
DR CARY FOWLER:
This is the largest and most comprehensive effort in history to conserve crop diversity, which is the biological foundation for agriculture.
DR PAUL WILLIS:
The Australian seeds at Svalbard are a long way from home…
MAN:
Booster ignition and lift-off…
DR PAUL WILLIS:
..but some others are making an even longer journey.
MAN:
Best of luck to the International Space Station's newest laboratory.
DR PAUL WILLIS:
Astronaut Greg Chamitoff took a small collection of our seeds with him on board the space shuttle Discovery. And they're up there with him right now on the International Space Station, just 400km above the Earth.
LEAHWYN SEED:
Well, we've sent four species up there — the Acacia pycnantha, the golden wattle, which is the national floral emblem for Australia, Telopea speciosissima, which is the State floral emblem, the waratah, Actinotus helianthi is the flannel flower and some Wollemi pine seeds. They were picked to represent a range of different types of seeds. So some really short-lived seeds and some really long-lived seeds.
DR PAUL WILLIS:
The space seeds went through much the same preparation as those destined for storage on Earth.
LEAHWYN SEED:
We'll collect the seed material and bring it into the Seedbank, where it will get cleaned and processed. So we'll separate all the debris and get it down to hopefully a mostly pure seed collection. We then need to dry that until it's reached quite a low moisture content so it's ready for storage.
DR PAUL WILLIS:
Normally they would be kept in a freezer at minus 18 degrees for long-term storage, but these are being kept at room temperature to match the conditions on the Space Station. So this is a duplicate set of the seeds that have gone into space?
LEAHWYN SEED:
That's right. This is the control sample.
DR PAUL WILLIS:
And so, what are you going to do with these ones?
LEAHWYN SEED:
We'll germinate them. We'll compare them to the ones that went into space.
DR PAUL WILLIS:
And I noticed that on the back there's a little doodad. What's that?
LEAHWYN SEED:
That's a data logger. It'll record the temperature that the seeds have been exposed to throughout the time.
DR PAUL WILLIS:
Seed banks are not mausoleums. Seeds are living material, dormant but ready to spring back into life, including the ones currently up in space. When they return to Earth, some of them will be germinated and compared to the control seeds that stayed behind.
LEAHWYN SEED:
Well, this is quite a simple project, where we just want to see if we can send the seeds into space and get them back and do that comparison and see whether there's any difference. And if we do end up finding a difference between those seeds that have gone into space and those that we've kept here, we'll be able to start looking at why that might have been the case.
DR PAUL WILLIS:
Plant research has been carried out on board the International Space Station ever since it first arrived in orbit. Some of that work has been directed towards growing crop plants off-planet, to produce food for a future colony on the moon or on Mars. Recently, they've been running experiments that investigate the effect of microgravity on plant growth and test cultivation techniques.
GEOFF STANGER:
So this is actually a double star. This is Alpha Centauri. Have a look. And this is the closest star to the sun. It's 4.5 light years away.
LEAHWYN SEED:
I'm hoping that the seeds going into space will really help to emphasise the diverse flora that we have and the really important role that seeds play in conservation.
GEOFF STANGER:
OK, girls, so now looking without the telescope, we can see what looks like a really bright star slowly moving across the sky, and that is the International Space Station.
GIRLS:
Wow. Cool. Oh, yeah! Oh, I see, I see.
