Resurrected after 32.000 years

[Irbis]

Flowering plant resurrected from 30,000-year-old squirrel stash

Russian biophysicists have managed to resurrect a 30,000-year-old plant after finding fruit tissue that was preserved in Siberian permafrost.

A team from the Institute of Cell Biophysics raised a small number of narrow-leafed Campion (Silene stenophylla) plants, from tissue found in an ancient squirrel burrow some 40 metres beneath the icy surface.

They used the plant's placental tissue -- the fruit structure to which seeds attach -- after an attempt to grow plants from mature S. Stenophylla seeds failed.

The plant is healthy and fertile, and producing white flowers and viable seeds. Svetlana Yashina, who led the regeneration effort, said the resurrected plant looked very similar to its modern version, which still grows in the Siberian tundra.

The Russian research team recovered the fruit during an investigation of dozens of burrows, which have remained hidden in ice deposits on the bank of the lower Kolyma River.

The football-sized burrows were often frozen solid, cemented and sealed shut by ice -- turning them into tiny cryogenic freezers. The chambers also held hay and animal fur, used by snoozing rodents to snuggle into.

The obvious next step is to use the same techniques to raise plants that are now extinct, or resurrect long-dead animals. Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study, told the Associated Press that he hopes to find frozen squirrel tissue, "and this path could lead us all the way to mammoth."

The Campion is by far the oldest plant to be regenerated from ancient seeds. Prior to this, the record lay with 2,000-year-old date palm seeds that were found at the top of a wind-swept desert fortress in Israel. In 2008, the ancient seeds grew into a 1.2-metre-tall plant.

Canadian researchers thought, in 2009, that they had cultivated Arctic lupine plants from 10,000-year-old seeds, found in a lemming burrow. Radiocarbon dating revealed, however, that the seeds were from the 1950s. Whoops.

The Campion seeds have been verified by radiocarbon dating to be 31,800 years old, give or take 300 years.

So, when we can start reserving tickets to Isla Nublar?

[Molyneux]

Very cool, in a weird way.
This leads to the question of what to do with it, though - do we try to reintroduce this plant to the wild? Do we just cultivate an isolated population?

[ArmorPierce]

The wording of the article doesn't seem to indicate that it was a extinct plant.

[Irbis]

The wording of the article doesn't seem to indicate that it was a extinct plant.

Um... IMHO, yes it is. The evolution made it move on, accumulating extra 32.000 years of genetic mutations among the way. Even if there is a direct descendant looking superficially similar, this one here should be literally the oldest (from evolutionary perspective) living multicellular organism on this planet.

Or not, in which case I'll be quickly corrected

Even so called living fossils can't exactly compare to that, as they never stopped evolving and adapting to their environment.

[Dass.Kapital]

*Cough*

Wollemi Pine?

http://www.wollemipine.com/index.php



Much cheers to you and yours.

[Irbis]

*Cough*

Wollemi Pine?

http://www.wollemipine.com/index.php



Much cheers to you and yours.

Eh, my understanding is, both this thing and, say, Latimeria continued to evolve through their existence and despite looks are much more 'advanced' (ok, I know evolution isn't exactly measured with words like that, I mean more efficient organs, more benefiting mutations, and better adaptation to environment) than their cousins of ages past were.

This one is exactly like organisms from the day mammoth roamed this world, and could probably tell scientists a lot about environment then if we understood DNA a lot better. Plus, if the plans of the scientists to try and bring back gone animals succeed, recreating things they used to eat would make process much more likely to be successful.

Well, I guess I just find relics of the past fascinating, even if it's something so small and relatively unimportant.

[CJvR]

IIRC the Japanese successfully planted some 2000 year old magnolia seeds that they had found in an old rice pit.

...Asada archaeological site. It is a Japanese bronze-age village, where the buildings are on stilts and have been reconstructed exactly as they were back then. The people who lived here were among the first people to work with metal and were also among the first people in Japan to learn how to plant and reap rice. They stored their harvest in small pits in the ground and in one of those pits scientists found a magnolia seed which - when they planted it - grew. At first it looked like Magnolia Kobus, a wild species that still grows in Japanese woods. But when it was 10 years old it flowered and revealed flowers with different numbers of petals on them. Is this because the seed was so old? Or is this what Magnolia Kobus used to look like 2,000 years ago? Or is this an ancient species that no longer exists? The questions have not yet been answered, but this ancient seed shows that plants are incomparable time travellers.

[Zor]

I knew they resurrected strains of grain from stuff found in Egyptian tombs, but i did not know seeds could survive so long in the ice.

Zor

[Irbis]

IIRC the Japanese successfully planted some 2000 year old magnolia seeds that they had found in an old rice pit.

Yeah, but still, this new find pushed the boundary back by order of magnitude compared to this.

I knew they resurrected strains of grain from stuff found in Egyptian tombs, but i did not know seeds could survive so long in the ice.

Eh, from article, it seems seed did not survive, the team basically cheated by forcing small, preserved plant to artificially grow seeds and obtained living specimens that way.

Though, that raises an interesting question. Is it still the same species as the one that grows in the wild? Technically, yes, but I read more articles about that plant and there are marked differences between both. In fact, gulf of 32.000 generations is larger than between some modern species... So, how it should be treated? Did we just broke naming system?