First national gene bank opens

China National GeneBank, the country's first national gene bank, was officially put into use on Thursday. The complex is expected to offer strong support to the development of the genetics industry.

Located in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, the billion-dollar CNGB covers an area of 47,500 square meters with a unique design like terraced fields and has saved more than 10 million bio-samples with a data storage capacity of 20 petabytes for phase I.

One petabyte is about 400 billion pages of word documents.