Wild flower blooms again after 30,000 years on ice (2012)

http://www.nature.com/news/wild-flower-blooms-again-after-30-000-years-on-ice-1.10069

by jackgavigan • 10 years ago

187 57 10 years ago

nature.com

Aelinsaar2• 10 years ago

Somewhat misleading title, but a very interesting read nonetheless. "Welcome... To Neolithic Park!"

rcthompson2• 10 years ago

What's misleading about it? Did you read it as saying the flower bloomed naturally after thawing without human help?

Aelinsaar2• 10 years ago

The flower itself didn't so much bloom after being frozen, as cultivated tissue was worked in vitro to produce a viable flower. It's not exactly clickbait given the payoff, but it's still less than truthful IMO.

bythe4mile• 10 years ago

Actually thats exactly what I thought it would be. Expected to see an area in the Tundra's with a wildflower bed.

tdy7214• 10 years ago

It does address unsuccessful attempts at 'natural' resurrection.

jrockway• 10 years ago

I guess it's all about freeze/thaw cycles, if the plant can handle one 6 month freeze, it can probably handle one 30,000 year freeze. The freezing is what causes damage, not the being-frozen. I guess.

kseistrup• 10 years ago

Even though the seed is frozen, respiration still goes on -- albeit slowly -- and eventually the seed will run out of fuel and die.

marcusgarvey• 10 years ago

Nice to read about a new breakthrough in botany. The field doesn't get much attention at all. Maybe now it will benefit from the popularity of Martian, the movie.

whyenot2• 10 years ago

As is true in many areas of organismal biology, botany is a field in decline. There are not a lot of jobs anymore, and in academia, not a lot of grant money. In spite of this, every year universities continue to pump out more and more graduates trained for careers that no longer exist. Some of the best botanists these days are citizen scientists who have day jobs at the Cheesecake Factory or driving limos in Las Vegas.

Tomte• 10 years ago

I've recently read a (German-language) article, that botanical gardens in Germany are an endangered species.

That's because they are expensive to maintain, professorships have been faded out and biology students and post-grads are usually not so much interested in real plants and systematics anymore, but more in genetics and laboratory work.

The small state of Saarland doesn't have a single publically accessible botanical garden anymore. Across Germany the outlook is dim.

grondilu• 10 years ago

When talking about megafauna resurrection, it is often said that it's not possible because DNA degrades too much after a few thousand years. Yet apparently the DNA of this plant was still viable. What am I missing?

jdavis703• 10 years ago

Perhaps plant DNA is hardier against time, bacteria, freeze/thaw cycles, etc than animal DNA? I'm not a biologist, so I'd also love to know.

danielmorozoff• 10 years ago

The tundra is primarily always frozen. As you point out freeze/thaw cycles are terrible for biochemical stability, but at the tundra below the surface (where earth acts as an heat insulator) I believe this effect is minimized

DNA has some remarkable stability properties when it comes to preservation. This is one of the reasons people are so interested in DNA storage technologies.

DNA chemistry allows for information to be preserved for millenia at sub-zero centigrade temperatures.

Robert N. Grass, Reinhard Heckel, Michela Puddu, Daniela Paunescu, Wendelin J. Stark. Robust Chemical Preservation of Digital Information on DNA in Silica with Error-Correcting Codes. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2015; DOI: 10.1002/anie.201411378

pvaldes3• 10 years ago

It depends of the species, but polyploidy is common in plants because plants often can work as colonial organisms that can clone itselves.

Is the same problem as to restore a file that is partially distroyed in four or five points. You can still recover the original file if you have five copies, each one with the damage in a different area. Polyploid organisms have several identical security copies of each chromosome. If something in a chromosome is damaged, they can quickly fix the damaged areas using the safety copy saved in his 'twin' chromosome.

quadrangle• 10 years ago

I think DNA breakdown makes it much less likely to find viable DNA, but not that it's impossible to find. I'm no expert though.

whyenot2• 10 years ago

A seed is a living organism essentially in suspended animation. Cells in the embryo have intact plasma membranes, DNA repair mechanisms are present (although working very slowly), each cell is surrounded by a cell wall, and the entire seed has an outer protective seed coat.

When people talk about DNA degrading, they are usually referring to DNA that is no longer inside living cells, and that doesn't have these multiple levels of protection.

wollstonecraft• 10 years ago

Ah, but this was somatic (fruit placental) tissue rather than germ that was viable.

tdy7214• 10 years ago

Plant's also generally contain much more DNA than animals. (fun fact of the day)

88e282102ae2e5b• 10 years ago

DNA that's hundreds of thousands of years old has been recovered [1]. Sorry for the non academic link but the number I've always been told was just under a million years, this seems reasonable at first blush.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/49366487/ns/technology_and_science...

tempestn• 10 years ago

Basically just time scale. When people talk about DNA having degraded too much, it's generally in the context of bringing back dinosaurs. Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago, which is (obviously) much longer than 30,000.

Until recently it was thought that DNA degraded more quickly, indeed making it un-viable after only a few thousand years, but a relatively recent study put the half life of DNA at 521 years, meaning that it would take several million years to degrade fully, under ideal conditions.[1]

Therefore, bringing back animals like the woolly mammoth should be quite feasible, but probably not dinosaurs.

[1] http://www.livescience.com/23861-fossil-dna-half-life.html

amelius• 10 years ago

I guess that even if the DNA breaks down into smaller strands, you can still computationally assemble the DNA back into its original form (just search for overlaps in the sequences, and stick these together).

(Remember that if you have multiple cells, you have lots of strands of the same DNA, all broken in different places.)

But I'm not an expert.

bryondowd2• 10 years ago

Not an expert, but I would think it depends how broken down they are. Assuming you have the tech to examine millions of fragments, you would still need long enough sequences for the overlaps to be unique. For instance, you probably couldn't put a book back together with nothing but ten character phrases, but you probably could with 100 characters. It would be interesting to run a simulation to see where the cutoff lies.

dgudkov2• 10 years ago

Can it be considered a one more proof supporting the Panspermia [1] hypothesis?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

spacecop3• 10 years ago

What does the resurrection of a flower have to do with the origin of life?

TheSpiceIsLife• 10 years ago

Nothing. But, Panspermia is not meant to address how life began, just the method that may cause its distribution in the Universe. - from the Panspermia Wikipedia article

DigitalSea• 10 years ago

Every day we inch one step closer to bringing back dinosaurs, thus making Jurassic Park a reality.

perseusprime11• 10 years ago

I agree. One of these days, one of the icebergs will crack revealing a massive dinosaur that will come out of it's cryo-sleep.

erikb2• 10 years ago

Please tell me that virusses and bacteria can't be revived after 30k years in ice, or that our imune system is able to remember its defenses against virusses and bacteria it hasn't seen for 30k years.

tdy7214• 10 years ago

"Revive" a virus? ...please elaborate!

erikb2• 10 years ago

Virus in position (x,y,z). It's f'n cold around it. It freezes. 30k years pass. Some scientist grabs ice and melts it. Virus is back.

I know it was quite hard to wrap one's head around this. Sorry that I didn't explain it more indepth to non initiated. That was so elitist of me.

(PS: I know what you want to say, but it's your own fault for arguing that way.)

adrianN3• 10 years ago

Our immune system is pretty good at identifying all kinds of foreign proteins. Unless a virus or bacterium has specifically evolved to evade our immune system, its chances are pretty bad. I wouldn't be too worried.

anotheryou• 10 years ago

and if we find natural antibiotics there is a good chance they work even better today, because adaption of the germs reverts over time.

thaumasiotes2• 10 years ago

tdy721 has been downvoted, but as far as I'm aware he's got the right idea. Viruses don't die. When outside a host, they basically just crystallize. If a plant can be viable after 30k years, a virus can definitely also be viable after the same 30k years.

rhinoceraptor• 10 years ago

This is one of the fears with global warming, that a virus trapped in ice may be thawed and we would be vulnerable to it.

DanBC• 10 years ago

This page lists a few fiction books that involve people somehow discovering ancient viruses at the antarctic. http://www.phys.barnard.edu/~kay/polar/genre.php

There's also a surprising number of Nazi secret bases.

jacquesm• 10 years ago

Surprised to see spam in the comments there, nature should do a better job of keeping their pages clean from trash like that.

Steeeve• 10 years ago

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

rubyfan• 10 years ago

Reminds me of an episode of Futurama where they revive xmas trees which were accidentally were cross contaminated with bio-weapons. Spoiler, the Christmas trees shoot exploding pine cones that multiply until the entire earth is covered in pine trees.

Amy: "What's that splork on them? It's not germs, is it?"

* https://theinfosphere.org/Transcript:The_Futurama_Holiday_Sp...

exabrial• 10 years ago

Im likely allergic. Thanks.

Wild flower blooms again after 30,000 years on ice (2012)

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