The doomsday seed vault buried deep in the side of a frozen mountain-side on the Island of Svalbard situated within the Arctic Circle has come to encapsulate the global imperative of conserving the biodiversity relating to the world's major food crops against the growing challenges resulting from rising human population, lost of agricultural land and climate change. Extending seed longevity in seed and gene banks is regarded as complementary to conserving plant genotypes in situ in their natural environment. Elucidating the basis and variation in seed physiology with respect to seed storage as well as other in vitro storage techniques such as cryopreservation are essential to success in this mission and in enabling ready access to these resources for future generations.

Key Concepts:

• Crop wild relatives are wild plant taxa that are closely related to a crop such as a wild ancestor, from which it might be possible to find and transfer beneficial traits for crop improvement.
  
• The classification of survival of species on the basis of the response of seeds to combinations of temperature and desiccation.
  
• Genetic resources is the term that refers to any material that contains functional units of heredity.
  
• Seeds with intermediate storage behaviour can tolerate moderate desiccation (8–12% moisture) but are sensitive to dry storage at temperatures at or below freezing.
  
• Serotiny is an ecological adaptation whereby some plant species release their seeds in response to environmental cues such as wetting, burning or warmth rather than the time when the seed reaches maturity.
  
• Seeds can be subjected to accelerated aging by storing seeds for short periods under stressed conditions of high humidity and high temperatures. This results in a fall in percentage germination that mimics the effect observed under long-term storage.