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Wild flower blooms again after 30,000 years on ice (2012)
- Aelinsaar 10y agoSomewhat misleading title, but a very interesting read nonetheless. "Welcome... To Neolithic Park!"
- rcthompson 10y agoWhat's misleading about it? Did you read it as saying the flower bloomed naturally after thawing without human help?
- Aelinsaar 10y agoThe 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.
- rcthompson 10y agoI guess I automatically assumed it was a human-assisted process since the link was to nature.com, although in hindsight it would have been equally publishable, if not more so, if the flower bloomed on its own.
- bythe4mile 10y agoActually thats exactly what I thought it would be. Expected to see an area in the Tundra's with a wildflower bed.
- tdy721 10y agoIt does address unsuccessful attempts at 'natural' resurrection.
- jrockway 10y agoI 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 10y agoEven though the seed is frozen, respiration still goes on -- albeit slowly -- and eventually the seed will run out of fuel and die.
- marcusgarvey 10y agoNice 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.
- whyenot 10y agoAs 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 10y agoI'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.
- adrianN 10y agoThe Saarland University has a (pretty small) botanical garden that is open to the public.
- dalke 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botanischer_Garten_der_Universit%C3%A4t_des_Saarlandes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botanischer_Garten_der_Univers... says it closed April 1, 2016. More details (in German) at http://www.uni-saarland.de/nc/aktuelles/artikel/nr/14351.html http://www.uni-saarland.de/nc/aktuelles/artikel/nr/14351.htm... .
- grondilu 10y agoWhen 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 10y agoPerhaps 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 10y agoThe 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
- pvaldes 10y agoIt 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 10y agoI 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.
- dgudkov 10y agoCan it be considered a one more proof supporting the Panspermia [1] hypothesis? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
- spacecop 10y agoWhat does the resurrection of a flower have to do with the origin of life?
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoNothing. 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
- spacecop 10y agoI'm sorry, I still don't understand the connection. Aliens buried the flowers under the tundra in the ice age? Why bring it up?
- wpears 10y agoIf the DNA in a seed is still in good enough shape to support blooming after being frozen 30,000 years, perhaps a seed frozen in a meteorite [1] could also survive long enough to be spread between solar systems. [1] maybe after glancing off a planet or created by the collision of two large objects
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- DigitalSea 10y agoEvery day we inch one step closer to bringing back dinosaurs, thus making Jurassic Park a reality.
- perseusprime11 10y agoI agree. One of these days, one of the icebergs will crack revealing a massive dinosaur that will come out of it's cryo-sleep.
- erikb 10y agoPlease 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.
- tdy721 10y ago"Revive" a virus? ...please elaborate!
- erikb 10y agoVirus 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.)
- thaumasiotes 10y ago> (PS: I know what you want to say, but it's your own fault for arguing that way.) If that's the game you're going to play, what was the point of your original comment? You're claiming to have known when you posted it that it was nonsense.
- tdy721 10y agoAhh, "The Andromeda Strain", good book that one.
- adrianN 10y agoOur 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 10y agoand if we find natural antibiotics there is a good chance they work even better today, because adaption of the germs reverts over time.
- jacquesm 10y agoSurprised to see spam in the comments there, nature should do a better job of keeping their pages clean from trash like that.
- Steeeve 10y agoYour scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
- rubyfan 10y agoReminds 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_Spectacular https://theinfosphere.org/Transcript:The_Futurama_Holiday_Sp...
- exabrial 10y agoIm likely allergic. Thanks.