Moscow State University (MSU) has been awarded Russia’s largest-ever science grant for the construction of a 166 square mile facility to hold DNA. If the project is successful it will hold DNA samples from every known species, living and extinct, by 2018.

The database will collect biomaterials from all of MSU’s scientific branches including the zoological museum, botanical garden and anthropological museum. All of the universities departments will be involved in the project including research and collecting materials.

“I call the project ‘Noah’s Ark.’ It will involve the creation of a depository – a databank for the storing of every living thing on Earth, including not only living, but disappearing and extinct organisms. This is the challenge we have set for ourselves. It will enable us to cryogenically freeze and store various cellular materials, which can then reproduce. It will also contain information systems. Not everything needs to be kept in a petri dish” said MSU rector Viktor Sadivnichy to RT.

The university hopes that the 1 billion ruble ($194 million US) project will encourage the next generation of Russia’s scientists.

“If it’s realized, this will be a leap in Russian history as the first nation to create an actual Noah’s Ark of sorts,” the Sadovinchy said.

Russia is, of course, not the first to build a genetic database. The US National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian, currently holds the largest collection. The museum’s Global Genome Initiative holds 4.2 million samples and the capacity to expand by another 800,000.

The San Diego Zoo’s Frozen Zoo holds 8,400 stem cells, sperm cells and other samples from over 800 species. A consortium of British museums, zoos and other institutions runs the Frozen Ark project has collected 48,000 samples from more than 5,500 species of animals. According to the Daily Mail this collection includes “7,000 are from species on the ‘red list’ of endangered animals”.

The Millennium Seed Bank Project technically collects seeds rather than DNA but, of course, seeds contain DNA. The seed bank is an international effort, with 80 nations participating and currently holds nearly 2 billion seeds from 34,088 wild plant species.

According to the seed bank 60 to 100 thousand plant species worldwide are currently threatened with extinction. The picture is at least equally bleak for animal species with many observers claiming that the Earth is facing a sixth “great extinction”.

“Habitat destruction, pollution or overfishing either kills off wild creatures and plants or leaves them badly weakened. The trouble is that in coming decades, the additional threat of worsening climate change will become more and more pronounced and could then kill off these survivors,” said Derek Tittensor, a marine ecologist at the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge to the Guardian earlier this month.

All of these genetic collections could become much more important as the controversial term “de-extinction” begins to circulate in scientific circles. De-extinction aims to return extinct animals to life using DNA and cloning technology. One early project currently underway at the University of California Santa Cruz aims to restore the extinct passenger pigeon using DNA collected from museum samples.

For fans of Jurassic Park it is worth noting that dinosaurs could never be brought back successfully. The most optimistic estimates hold that fossilized DNA can remain viable for up to 6.8 million years. The last of the dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago.