Le Anh Quynh

Resident Huỳnh Ngọc Vân at his old seaside home, surrounded by demolished houses cleared for the project, late April 2025. Image by Le Quynh for Mongabay. Rạch Tràm fishing village stretches along the northern coast of Vietnam’s Phú Quốc Island. Surrounded on three sides by the forests of Phú Quốc National Park and facing the Gulf of Thailand on the other, with Cambodia visible across the water, the village has until recently been part of a pristine river-forest-sea ecosystem.

However, institutional seed banks face funding challenges. “In the past, funding for our gene bank came entirely from the Plant Resources Center, which supported cold storage and seed rejuvenation,” says Trần Ngọc Thạch, the institute’s director. “But now, we fund the cold storage ourselves, so preservation is less than ideal.” There are two main strategies for conserving wild rice: ex-situ, through storage in seed banks, and in-situ, conserving the plants in their natural habitats.

1. Introduction Due to their organ size, anatomical, and physiological similarities to humans, pigs have gained considerable attention as valuable large animal models in translational biomedical research (1). These models are utilized to study human diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (2), cardiovascular diseases (3, 4), and diabetes mellitus (5).