Millennium Seed Bank, cold storage door

This image is part of the feature Seed Bank

Credit: JAMES KING-HOLMES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

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Caption: Millennium Seed Bank. Researcher exiting the cold storage vault of the Wellcome Trust Millennium Building, Wakehurst Place, Sussex, UK. This building is home to the Millennium Seed Bank Project, an international effort aimed at safeguarding seeds from 30,000 species, representing 10 percent of all the flowering plants from around the world. Seeds arriving at the seed bank are checked for pests and diseases, assessed for viability, dried, and then stored in airtight jars and kept in the seed-storage vault at minus 20 degrees Celsius. In 2007 the seed bank contained seeds from over 18,000 species spanning 126 countries, making it the largest wild seed collection in the world.

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