Scientists are trying to decode an ancient flower to find out why its seeds can remain dormant for tens of thousands of years.
Origin of the 32,000-year-old flower
This is a 32,000-year-old plant that Russian scientists have revived in recent years. It is Silene stenophylla, a white-flowered plant native to Siberia. The plant's seeds were buried about 124 feet (37.7 meters) underground in permafrost near the Kolyma River in Siberia. Silene stenophylla belongs to the Caryophyllaceae family, commonly found in the Arctic and the northern mountains of Japan.
 |
The revival of the ancient flower
A research team from the Russian Academy of Sciences then extracted placental tissue from the frozen seeds and cultured them with a mixture of different nutrients. Under controlled temperature and light conditions, the tissues germinated, took root, and grew into plants inside a greenhouse environment.
Austrian scientists are trying to decode the genome of Silene stenophylla. Photo: CGTN.
At the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria, Professor Margit Laimer and colleagues are trying to sequence the genome and decode the DNA sequence of this ancient plant. They want to find out what is special about the genome of the ancient flower and how the components of the genome interact with each other. The ultimate goal is to find out the conditions that allow seeds to remain dormant for tens of thousands of years.
"Plants also change and adapt to the environment. We hope to be able to find changes in the genome that help plants adapt to very dry, very cold, or very hot conditions. Using this knowledge, we can find ways to improve plant varieties," Laimer said.
The revival of the Silene stenophylla flower has created a new step forward in the process of ancient biological research and created a premise to revive ancient plant species that have disappeared.