The plant from 30,000 years ago…
… is NOT the name of a science fiction movie. 
Biology is AMAZING! (You can tell that I still love it!)
A plant that was frozen in the permafrost of Siberia has been revived by Russian scientists and has even borne FRUIT! A team of researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Pushchino managed to get the frozen remains of a 30,000-year-old ice-age flower, Silene stenophylla (narrow-leafed campion) specimen to producing delicate white flowers and then fruit. The team started with, not seeds, but tissue from immature fruits buried in fossil squirrel burrows around 90 feet below the surface. The research was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work describes what is a RECORD for reviving presumably dead plant tissue. The study was led by Svetlana Yashina of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The corresponding author, David Gilichinsky, died last week, only days before the publication of the paper.
“I’m absolutely thrilled with the result,” said Grant Zazula, a paleontologist with the Yukon government in Canada who reviewed the study for the journal. “I’ve always been excited for the potential of something like this being successful.”
Although the Arctic tundra holds much organic matter, from grains of pollen to the bones of ancient mammals, some areas, like those of northeastern Siberia, are VERY hard to reach. Bacteria, and other simple organisms, can survive in ice for thousands of years, but bringing back a plant is MUCH more complicated.
“It is like generating a dinosaur from an ancient egg,” said Jane Shen-Miller, a plant biologist at UCLA who has sprouted a 1,300-year-old lotus seed.
In the study, scientists took thawed, washed, and disinfected the fruits and took out bits of nutrient-rich fruit flesh known as placental tissue. Placental tissue acts like the plant version of stem cells. When the tissue was placed into a nutrient broth the tissue grew into a complete plant, which, when fertilized by another such plant, produced fruit.
In the experiment, the ancient plants were compared with modern relatives.
“The ancient ones produced 1.5 to 2 times as many buds but were slower to grow roots. The petals on the ancient flowers were narrower than the modern petals, and some of the blooms were exclusively female — unlike the modern flowers, which had both male and female parts.”
While scientists await genetic comparisons, they discuss the implications for the genetic engineering of hardier plant species and for the revival of large, extinct animal species.
-Bill at
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