Chokeberries also are more commonly being used as a beneficial landscaping choice. He said a hybrid of the aronia berries can be found in some grocery stores in late summer and it is often added as a natural food coloring to frozen fruit juice products.Ĭhokeberry fruit is desirable because it has a high level of antioxidants, higher than blueberries, for instance. “We had very little genetics in our holdings that are of Midwestern origin and were basically filling a collection gap.”Ĭhokeberries have become a common alternative crop in agriculture, Carstens said. “Historically speaking, we have a very good collection of aronia, but it’s focused on most of the New England states or the eastern portion of the U.S.,” Carstens said. The foray was organized with help from the Illinois Natural History Survey, which records the location of the state’s many flora and fauna species. In 2021, the Ames group was searching for aronia, commonly known as chokeberry, because the vault was missing Midwestern variants of this plant. ![]() The Ames seed vault was the first in the nation when it opened in 1948. The USDA operates 20 seed banks in the United States known as the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service. He works for the Ames facility, which is a collaboration between Iowa State University and the U.S. Horticulturist Jeffrey Carstens led the team to Illinois in May and August 2021 to collect the seeds and plant materials. The samples also are protected and prepped for use by scientists as they work to create disease-resistant species. Seed collecting is part of national and international programs designed to preserve genetic materials should there be natural or human-caused disasters that harm or eliminate species and reduce the planet’s biodiversity. ![]() The Norway facility offers, “safe, free and long-term storage of seed duplicates from all genebanks and nations participating in the global community’s joint effort to ensure the world’s future food supply.” The chokeberry seeds are stored in re-sealable, thick-plastic, see-through packaging being kept at a cool minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 Fahrenheit) in a large walk-in freezer.Īdditional seeds grown from some of the Illinois samples could, eventually, go to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. The leaf tissue samples were placed in packets with silica beads, freeze dried and tucked into sealed, air-tight packets that are now being stored in a room at 5 degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit). The genetic materials will be used for research projects and stored for safekeeping in a seed bank at the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station in Ames, Iowa, as well as at the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado, which is a long-term, backup storage facility. The Kankakee Sands specimens are among leaf tissue and seeds collected from four Illinois sites. Chokeberry seeds that were plucked from the Forest Preserve District's Kankakee Sands Preserve in Custer Township last year are now being stored in two national seed vaults.
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