Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vog obam here. If you've never heard of a seed bank, the basic idea is this, when the apocalypse is over and the forests are nothing but smoking ruins in the fields, barren of grain, fear not. We can reboot the world thanks to our bank seeds
stored in bunker's strategically located from here to eternity. These fall Bard International Seed Vault in Norway, for instance, currently holds more than eight hundred and eighty thousand seeds and has the capacity to hold up to two point five billion. Seeds are pretty amazing forms of reproduction. All you need to do is dry them out and freeze them solid, and they can last for years. It's a comforting thought and acep civilizations sleeve and the seemingly less and less
unlikely scenario that we self destruct. The u n's Global Strategy for Plant Conservation plans to bank sev of all plant species by but hold that arguably comforting thought a sing to a study from researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens Queue, there's a significant catch. They discovered that a whole host of plant seeds just can't be banked, including avocado, cacao,
and mango. Their findings, which were published in a November twenty eighteen issue of the journal Nature Plants, detail how a full thirty three percent of tree species alone are on this list, including oak and chestnut trees. We're still thirty six percent of our critically endangered species are also unbankable, and that's not even counting of the regular old endangered plants or of the vulnerable ones. So why can't these
seeds be banked? Apparently not all seeds like the drying out process, and for this they are labeled recalcitrant seeds, which seems a little unfair calling a seed stubborn just because it can't tolerate dehydration as a bit rich coming from species that can barely last two days without water. Luckily, there's a way out of this jam, and it involves
liquid nitrogen, which is always fun. Yes, to make sure we've got all our seeds safely tucked away in indefinite storage, we have to resort to cryo preservation, just like Ted Williams and all the other immortals being kept on ice. All one has to do is dissect the seed pry out its embryo and plunge it into smoking cold nitrogen.
Instead of storing seeds at a conventional negative twenty degrees celsius that's negative four degrees fahrenheit, going cry oh will keep these finicky seeds in suspended animation at a subglacial temperature of negative a hundred and ninety six degrees celsius that's negative degrees fahrenheit. Some researchers advocate cryo preservation for all seeds, even the cooperative ones, because they'll last longer. Of course, a full aut apocalypse isn't the only reason
for banking seeds. Climate change, habitat loss, and the growing threat of plant pathogens are already threatening biodiversity, so the time to preserve seeds is now, though taking steps to protect habitats and slow climate change would certainly be good as well. Today's episode was written by Machine Karen and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other super cool topics, visit our home planet,
how stuff Works dot com. And for more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,