An international seed bank has reached its target of collecting 10% of the world's wild plants, with seeds of a pink banana among its latest entries.

随着一种粉色香蕉种子的最新加入，一所国际种子站达到了收集世界上野生植物种子10%的目标。

A wild banana has been chosen as a flagship species

The wild banana, Musa itinerans, is a favourite of wild Asian elephants.

Seeds from the plant, which is under threat from agriculture, join 1.7 billion already stored by Kew's Millennium¹ Seed Bank partnership².

The project has been described as an "insurance strategy" against future biodiversity losses.

The seed bank partnership, which involves more than 120 organisations in 54 countries, is now aiming to collect and conserve³ seeds from a quarter of the Earth's flowering plant species by 2020.

All the seeds are kept both in their country of origin and in Royal Botanic Gardens Kew's premises⁴（单位，楼宇） at Wakehurst Place, West Sussex, where they are stored in underground vaults⁵（窖，地下室） that are kept at -20C.

The plant material is dried, cleaned and sorted, ensuring only the finest specimens⁶ make it into the giant freezers. There, the cold and arid⁷（干燥的） conditions keep the seeds in pristine⁸（古时的，原始的） condition for anywhere between a few years to thousands of years, depending on the species.

The aim is that each seed stored in the bank can be regrown, should the need arise.

The wild banana plant from China was selected as the "10% species" by the bank's international collaborators because it fulfilled a number of conservation（保存，保护） criteria⁹（标准）.

Janet Terry, the seed processing manager at the bank, said: "It was chosen because it is representative of what the whole project is all about - it is endemic（风土的，地方的）, endangered and it is an economic species.

"And of course, everybody loves a banana."

Musa itinerans becomes the 24,200th species to have been stored in the seed bank.

The 10% target was set when the Wakehurst Place facility was completed in 2000.

At that time, it was estimated that there were 242,000 plant species in the world, although more recently it is thought that there might be 300,000.

Professor Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, told BBC News: "In the next phase, we want to secure another 15%, so by 2020 we will have a quarter of the world's seeds banked in both the country of origin and Wakehurst Place.

"And a major focus is going to be a considerable expansion in the sustainable use of seeds for human benefit."

The researchers will be focusing on food security, biodiversity loss and climate change.

Professor Hopper added: "The thing that has changed over this 10-year period is a much more acute awareness¹⁰ of climate change as a threatening process, as well as the many others that impact on plant life.

"And the seed bank, as an insurance strategy, is a good sensible way of keeping your options open for the future."