Flowers Regenerated From 30,000-Year-Old Frozen Fruits, Buried By Ancient Squirrels

Svetlana Yashina from the Russian Academy of Sciences grew the plants from immature fruits recovered from the burrow. She extracted their placentas – the structure that the seeds attach to – and bathed them in a brew of sugars, vitamins and growth factors. From these tissues, roots and shoots emerged.

Flowers regenerated from 30,000-year-old frozen fruits, buried by ancient squirrels

HERE February 21, 2012 crisisboom

Yashina potted the plants and two years later, they developed flowers. She fertilised the ancient flowers with each other’s pollen, and in a few months, they had produced their own seeds and fruits, all viable. The frozen plants, blooming again after millennia in the freezer, seeded a new generation.

S.stenophylla is still around, but Yashina found that the ancient plants are subtly different to their modern counterparts, even those taken from the same region. They’re slower to grow roots, they produce more buds, and their flower petals were wider.

This is the first time that anyone has grown plants form seeds deeply buried within permanently frozen burrows. But it’s not the first time that someone has tried. In 1967, Canadian scientists claimed that they had regenerated Arctic lupin from 10,000 year old seeds that had been buried by lemmings. But in 2009, another team dated those same seeds and found that they were actually modern ones, which had contaminated the ancient sample. Full Story HERE