DOOMED?: Banking a narrow selection of seeds and other plant material may be insufficient in a rapidly changing climate.JUCEMBER/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
In 2006, plant geneticist Johanna Schmitt, then of Brown University, and her colleagues set out on a massive gardening experiment that would span four countries and come to include thousands of Arabidopsis thaliana plants, millions of fruit specimens, and a lot of chocolate chip cookies. In gardens in Finland, Germany, England, and Spain, Schmitt’s team sowed Arabidopsis seeds collected from all over Europe and Asia—from as far afield as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and eastern Russia to sites in Western Europe and Scandinavia. The researchers were testing which seeds would fare best when grown in each of the four countries. (The cookies were later used to incentivize Brown undergraduates to manually count the small, cigar-shape fruits that grew in the gardens—every 10,000 fruits they counted earned them ...
