china's first national gene bank, china national genebank (cngb), opened in shenzhen thursday, with the goal of protecting, researching and utilizing genetic resources.
the bank, a nonprofit research institute founded by the chinese government and shenzhen's genomics sequencing company bgi, will serve as a collector of genetic information from all forms of biology, including humans, animals, plants and microorganisms. besides preservation of china's genetic heritage, the bank will serve as a clearing house for information, furthering research.
the billion-dollar bank, covering more than 47,500 square meters and located in dapeng new area, marks a new phase in chinese-international genomics collaboration, providing scientists from across the world access to one of the world's most comprehensive and sophisticated biorepositories with the goal of enabling breakthroughs in human health research and contributing to global biodiversity conservation efforts.
bgi president and co-founder wang jian said at thursday's opening ceremony that the mission of cngb is to preserve the essence of a billion years' evolutionary history and deposit the life foundation of billions of people.
the bank is outfitted with dozens of refrigerators to store samples, as well as 150 domestically developed desktop gene sequencing machines. the bank will work to restore global biological samples and data. a total of 10 million samples are currently stored in the bank.
"we hope to preserve more diversified samples and digitalize the samples in order to apply the data in advancing people's livelihoods, especially in health-care systems, so that everyone can enjoy the benefits brought by the resources," wang said.
the national gene pool consists of a biological information database and biological sample library. it can support 60pb of gene data access. if a movie is 500mb, then that amount is equal to 128 million movies.
cngb is the world's fourth national-level gene bank, followed by predecessors in the united states, europe and japan.
also thursday, cngb signed cooperation agreements with global partners, including svalbard global seed vault and german cancer research center in the areas of seed digitalization, the epigenetics of children's health and phage genome synthesis.
