Really neat USDA facility. It's the national backup bank which holds reserves for research, breeders, and conservation efforts. It has a 4-floor vault which stores animal/plant/microbe/insect samples- seeds, budwood, sperm, eggs. The vault is heavily reinforced to the point that it can withstand a train impact and is mostly kept at -18C and 25%~ relative humidity so that samples can be stored for decades or longer. Some samples are a neat pig, others are noxious weeds or corn with a specific target gene, others are entire ecosystems catalogued so that we can reseed them from scratch.
Some of the samples are stored bagged on racks. That section had thousands upon thousands of bags filled with seeds. Others are kept in large liquid nitrogen vats. I got photos of the insides of two, one with large canisters that are filled with individual seed collections and another with 6 species of sperm from who knows how many breeds/specimens represented. I confirmed that it's bee cum. The vats are loaded arbitrarily based on which has space available and they only last 20-30 years at a cost of $35k each.
They also have a neat clonal propagation room for when they're checking to make sure that samples are still viable. Apparently someone is growing out all of the bananas today. Like the national reserve of bananas.
Their infographic says they have 789k seed samples, 12k clones, 114k microbes, and 957k animal samples from 51k animals of 17 categories. Also the Smithsonian Institute's coral gene samples. That's outdated and apparently the collection is much larger now, growing by like 10k samples per month.
Fuck I want to work there.
Fuck I want to work there.
Making sticky notes that say "do NOT guzzle the USDA ____ cum reserve" and putting it on everything
I want to be the scientist who spent 10 years and $100k studying to become a bee masturbator.
Dress for the job you want (a " I <3 cranking bee hogs" t shirt in your case).
Sounds like a dope trip, though!
Definitely an awesome place to check out. I think it's the largest facility like this outside of Svalbard. Apparently another national gene bank the host toured only had one of those liquid nitrogen tanks and this place is about to bring another row of like 20 online.
https://www.ars-grin.gov/
Also, there's the database linked to this where you can request specimens with particular attributes you're looking for. They're apparently picky about which research gets selected.
ARS is rad. For 12 bucks you can get one of a truly invredible array of microbes shipped straight to you. I made my own Koji with a specimen we ordered for research once. 10/10 more government agencies should send people fungi.
I wish this bank had more fungi. Apparently they had a curator who was working on it but they retired recently, so like all of American fungiculture is unrepresented. They have pathogenic microbes and samples from different ecosystems at least but no grand collection of every fungi that grows in the Rockies or something.
edit: Native bees too. They have the commercial honey bee species but no samples from any of the native pollinators. I think there's a national conservation-focused one which does store those.
That would take some doing as nobody knows how many species there are (or even what qualifies as a species). I recall a paper a couple years back where the researchers just pyrosequenced a bunch of soil from Alaska and said they had no idea what 20% of what they found even was. Would be nice to see the cultures broadened to stuff outside of agricultural/food production, especially since we're probably going to start losing diversity in the wild as things get warmer. More funding for mycologists!
Similar but even more extreme situation with microbes, I think you can sequence a millilitre of seawater and 90% of it will be unknown and/or unculturable
Apparently there is a train line nearby, for anyone wondering why they would want to reinforce it against a train impact specifically...
"But sir, how will we penetrate the vault?" "It's simple see... We only need to redirect the closest two miles of train track."
Sounds to me like you basically visited the CUM bank.
Did they have jugs on shelves with large red labels that read CUM? I bet they had, but of course you would never tell us.
Edit: I wasn't the first to make cum jokes. I bow my head in shame.
I wish they did but they're all tiny vials akin to a mercury thermometer. Snack-sized.
