A Russian team discovered and find out a seed cache of Silene stenophylla, a flowering plant inhabitant to Siberia that had been buried by an Ice Age squirrel near the banks of the Kolyma River (map). Radiocarbon dating confirmed that the seeds were 32,000 years old. The mature and immature seeds, which had been entirely enclosed in ice, were discovered from 124 feet (38 meters) below the permafrost, surrounded by layers that included mammoth, bison, and woolly rhinoceros bones. The mature seeds had been damaged—perhaps by the squirrel itself, to prevent them from germinating in the burrow. But some of the immature seeds retained feasible, viable plant material.
The team extracted that tissue from the frozen seeds, placed it in vials, and successfully germinated the plants, according to a latest study. The plants—just like each other but with different flower shapes from modern S. stenophylla—grew, flowered, and, after a year, created seeds of their own. ”I can’t see any intrinsic fault in the article,” said botanist Peter Raven, President Emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden, who was not involved in the study. “Though it’s such an extraordinary report that of course you’d want to repeat it.” Raven is also head of National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)
Plant Study May Assist Seed Vaults:
The new study suggests that permafrost could be a “depository for an ancient gene pool,” a place where any number of now extinct species could be found and resurrected, experts says. ”Indeed some of the plants that were cultivated in ancient times and have gone extinct or other plants once significant to ecosystems which have disappeared would be incredibly useful, constructive today if they could be brought back,” said Elaine Solowey, a botanist at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel. Solowey resurrected the 2,000-year-old date palm that previously held the title of oldest regenerated seed.
Her palm seed, though, had been buried in a dry, cool area, a far cry from the S. stenophylla seeds’ permafrost environment. Regenerating seeds that have been frozen at 19 degrees Fahrenheit (-7 degrees Celsius) for so long could have major implications, said Solowey, who was not involved in the fresh study. That’s because all seed-saving projects—the nearly all well-known being perhaps Norway’s so-called doomsday vault, aka the Svalbard Global Seed Vault—depend on freezing seeds. ”Any insight gained on seeds which have been frozen and how to defrost them and develop them is incredibly precious,” she said. Moreover he said, The Missouri Botanical Garden’s Raven, if we can discover the conditions that kept the seeds viable for 32,000 years, then “if you were doing it yourself, you’d be able to preserve [seeds] for longer.”
