In the midst of rising demand for safety like a risk hedge by shifting the overconcentrated pattern to a decentralized formation after the recent Great East Japan Earthquake, the National Institutes of Natural Sciences will build up a frozen storage backup facility in the National Institute for Basic Biology to be completed in late February of 2013.

This Interuniversity Bio-Backup Project (IBBP) Center is aimed to prevent damage and loss of the biological genetic resources which are indispensable for biological science researches. The center is planning to cryopreserve in LIN about 1.4 million samples of plants and animals, culture cells, microorganisms and genes in a two-storied earthquake-resistant building having a floor space of 500 square meter. The third supplementary budget of MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) is utilized for this project with a total investment of 650 million yen including a large-scale cryopreservation tank equipped with the automatic LIN supply function, ultracold freezer, laboratory automation system, cell culture equipment and diesel power generator.

Kiyoshi Naruse, associate professor of the institute says, “We do not know clearly why this institute has been chosen, but most probably, it was because the positive acceptance of the biological samples in the devastated lab facilities was called enthusiastically by the institute just after the Quake leading to this offer, in addition to the reason of its logistic position with an equal distance with the researchers. Furthermore, with regard to many reports on breakage of breeding/cultivating facilities due to the Quake, the meltdown of frozen samples and extinction or dying of breeding/cultivating plants and animals, he is positive to say, “I saw the researchers who had instantaneously lost in the Quake the valuable researches to which they had been devoting most of their life. It is not so easy to draw up individual needs, but we would like to create safe environments for research avoiding discontinuation of ongoing works, so that the project may nestle close to users.”

Alike but quite different in nature, there is National Bio-Resource Project (NBRP) which started 10 years ago aiming to collect, preserve and provide for common possession among researchers the samples with which researches had already ended in universities or institutes. The project is now provided with 29 kinds of plants and animals, having its central base. The institute is aiming at that both IBBP and NBRP will mutually transfer with each other.