30,000 year old plant seeds grown!

This is amazing news, plant seeds found in an ancient squirrel nest were grown and now the flower developed seeds! http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/02/22/3436826.htm

Very interesting

I read about that and find it really interesting. Sort of amazing. I wonder if I should try seed that are about four years old.

reminds me of the tree, The Senator, I believe it as called? The world's 5th oldest tree recorded, if I am getting my facts straight. Someone burned it down, while doing drugs in it. (It was a HUGE tree and had a hollowed out area where people went inside)
What a shame.

That scientific experiment has been widely mis-reported. This kind of reminds me of that old parlor game, sometimes called "rumors", where a story would be whispered around a circle of people, with amazing differences between the original story and the final story, although each participant was instructed to faithfully pass on the story as they heard it.

If you read the article, they tried to grow the seeds and that failed. They then resorted to tissue culture of some living cells that were in the fruit that contained the seeds. Tissue culture is a very powerful technique, because it can re-generate a whole plant from a single living cell taken from a plant. Although the ancient seeds were not viable, and did not germinate, some plant cells had survived in the permafrost, and Tissue Culture "saved the day".

The Internet is a powerful transmitter of information, but unfortunately it is also a powerful transmitter of mis-information. Bottom line: 30,000 year old plant seeds were not grown.

I see my mistake. But still an amazing feat that's noteworthy!

still it seems that a 30,000 yr old plant was able to be brought to 'life', I am not sure that tissue culture always gives an exact replica of a plant however.

Tissue culture is a means of asexual reproduction which will produce a genetic clone of the original plant.

I expect that Tissue Culture will be used to recover other extinct plants from still living cells found in the permafrost. Just one microscopic cell could be enough. And these plants will be able to produce viable seeds, so they may be widely grown again. I have a little bit of concern that some of these prehistoric plants might have the ability to become an invasive species, but hopefully due precautions will be taken. It might be possible to cross them with related present-day plants. I would be very interested if they could recover any prehistoric zinnias, because I grow and breed zinnias as a hobby. I would like to get my hands on a prehistoric zinnia. I'm attaching a picture of one of my home-hybridized zinnias that had a kind of wild prehistoric look.

On a somewhat related note, there has been talk of using DNA from a frozen baby mammoth to create a mammoth fetus in an elephant, and thus restore that extinct animal. Maybe the movie Jurassic Park wasn't so far-fetched after all.

ZM

It is my understanding that tissue culture is done using a few selected cells from the original plant. If those cells have any deformity in them, the plant is not true. Some plants can be grown from tissue culture, others do not do well. Daylilies are one that it is not a good idea to tissue culture.

I heard about the Mammoth to, I'd be amazed if they had a wild population living somewhere cold again, but my worries would be trophy hunters.

Hi Frilly,

It is true that tissue culture does tend to produce a higher than normal number of mutations. That is a bad thing if you are buying a named variety, and the plants you get are from TC, and you get a mutation of the named variety instead of the named variety that you ordered and paid for.

But tissue culture induced mutations can be a valuable tool in plant breeding. Daylily breeders deliberately cross different specimens and grow seeds from them, fully expecting and hoping for new forms from which to select something special. It is a bit ironic that on the one hand they want new forms and on the other hand they don't. If I were breeding daylilies, I would be doing my own tissue cultures, and I would be looking for any interesting new forms that arose out of that.

But I understand that Tissue Culture is an issue with daylilies, and this is a message thread in a different forum that discussed that, with several different viewpoints being expressed.

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/daylily/msg041521222461.html

Tissue culture does have advantages for daylily propagation, and for some people those advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

http://www.gemination.com/

The attached picture is of a zinnia mutation I had last year. I like it a lot, but I realize that if you bought a package of zinnia seeds expecting conventional zinnias, that you might consider this as "defective" and simply pull it up. I selfed it and crossed it with other zinnias, hoping to see more like it this year.

ZM
(not associated with any product or vendor mentioned or linked)