Five years after the project's approval, China's first national gene bank has opened today in the southern city of Shenzhen. The world's largest gene pool is expected to help protect and advance research in genetic resources, as well as boot China's genetics industry.

A terrace-like building stores China's unique genetic resources and data, as well as biological information. It consists of a biological information database, a biological specimen bank, and a living biological bank.

Currently, the data giant has a collection of 10 million samples of biological resources, and can support a total of 60 petabytes of gene data access.

If a video file is 500 megabytes for example, then that amount is equal to nearly 130 million copies of that video.

Genetic resources are national strategic resources, and are key to a country's performance in the future competition of a bio-based economy. So, the project hopes to boost both research and business in fields of health, agriculture, species diversity and environmental protection.

"The data bank will provide not only research data, but also industry statistics. We will provide service and support for industrial organizations," said Xu Xun, executive director of China National Genebank.

Before its official opening, the gene bank built extensive cooperation with foreign research institutes and biological organizations. Those include the Global Genome Biodiversity Network and Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a secure seed bank in Norway.

The newly opened gene bank will now also be able to exchange data with other authoritative databases on a daily basis.

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