Ukraine’s agricultural research is threatened by the war
It was a moment of horror. In a video posted on the internet on May 14th Sergey Avramenko, a researcher at the National Gene Bank of Plants of Ukraine, the world’s tenth-largest such facility, ran his fingers through bags of charred seeds. “Everything turned to ashes,” he grieved. It later emerged that only an outpost of the bank had suffered the shelling which caused this destruction. The main trove of seeds remains safe in an underground vault. But it may have been a close-run thing. The bank in question is in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, and that city’s defenders have only now repelled the Russian forces which were besieging it.The Kharkiv gene bank’s precarious situation underscores the importance of protecting and conserving genetic material from crops, as climate change and a growing, prospering human population drive demand for novel approaches to plant breeding. It started as an experimental station in 1908 and is now one of more than 1,700 such repositories around the world. The purpose of gene banks is to archive crop biodiversity. Mostly, this is done by dehydrating and freezing seeds. The un’s Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that, over the 20th century, the diversity of planted crops shrank by 75% as commercial farmers concentrated their efforts on a few reliable varieties. But the varieties abandoned as a consequence may still conceal valuable properties, and modern genetic techniques, such as genome-wide association studies (which look for synergies between different parts of a genome), may be able to excavate and make use of these. “It’s life insurance to be able to plant in the future,” says Lise Lykke Steffensen, the director of the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre, which operates one of the biggest and best-known seed banks, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in the eponymous Norwegian archipelago. Besides the obvious risks of higher temperatures and more frequent droughts, climate change may also encourage new pests and diseases. To prepare for such events, breeders will need a formidable genetic arsenal to pick from. Though Kharkiv’s vault remains intact, the attack has sparked worries. Even with Russian troops now driven back, the 150,000 samples of 1,802 species representing 544 types of crop which it hosts are still at risk while the war rages. So are collections of crops such as strawberries and grapes that are propagated by cuttings rather than seeds, and are conserved by the bank in open fields. Moreover, Kharkiv’s is not the only facility affected by the war. In March, for example, Ukraine lost access to a plant-irrigation institute in Kherson when that city fell to Russian forces. And, as Olga Trofimtseva, an agriculture expert at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, observes, many agricultural-research workers have joined the army, while others have left the country. A need for diversitySuch problems are not unprecedented. In 2002 Afghanistan’s national seed bank, in Kabul, was destroyed in combat and looted. A year later the same happened to Iraq’s seed bank in Abu Ghraib. And a collection of seeds from dry areas based in Aleppo, Syria, closed in 2012 as the civil war began, and had to be re-established in Lebanon and Morocco. It has thus become good practice in all countries to back up seed collections abroad. The Svalbard vault, for example, holds some 1.1m samples, many of them on behalf of other institutions. Even so, many gene banks, Ukraine’s included, lack the resources to turn out the extra seeds required to back their collections up completely. As a result, only 2,800 of Ukraine’s 150,000 samples have duplicates in Svalbard’s permafrost. The country does store some duplicates elsewhere, but unfortunately “elsewhere” includes the Vavilov seed bank in St Petersburg, now enemy territory. Ms Trofimtseva hopes that after the war is over Ukraine’s agricultural-research institutions, until now hard-wired into networks developed in Russian-imperial and Soviet times, will diversify their connections by also plugging themselves into other institutions of agronomy all around the world. ■