Scientists Clone Oldest Living Organism

goran72 sends along the story of the world's oldest living organism, a shrub that grows in Tasmania and reproduces only by cloning. Tasmanian scientists have cloned Lomatia tasmanica as part of a battle to save it from a deadly fungus. From the RTBG's press release (which seems to load slowly in the US):"The Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens [RTBG] is working towards securing the future of a rare and ancient Tasmanian native plant... Lomatia tasmanica, commonly known as King's Lomatia, is critically endangered with less than 500 plants growing in the wild in a tiny pocket of Tasmania's isolated south west. The RTBG has been propagating the plant from cuttings since 1994... 'Fossil leaves of the plant found in the south west were dated at 43,600 years old and given that the species is a clone, it is possibly the oldest living plant in the world,' [Botanist Natalie Tapson] said."

Comments

Way of the Dodo?

[Anonymous Coward]

So can we have our Dodo bird back?

Re:Way of the Dodo?

[node 3]

I guess we will watch Jurassic Park 4 live. :)

But only for dinosaurs that are not extinct, and naturally reproduce by cloning.

Great work scientists! You've cloned an already self-cloning plant! Maybe next you can work on creating flying birds...

Re:Way of the Dodo?

[Brian Gordon]

Nono, every 20,000 years or so an advanced civilization rises up from the prairies and survives roughly long enough to clone the plant in a lab. The plant has naturally evolved a mechanism whereby it propagates a miles-wide fibrous network of false fossils to interest paleontologists, with the most interesting fossils around the plant itself.

It's an extraordinarily patient tree.

not necessarily oldest living organism

[Trepidity]

First, of course, what exactly constitutes a single "organism" is a bit controversial, especially with plants, and especially with clonal colonies. But even if you accept clonal colonies as bona-fide organisms, Pando in Utah may or may not be older than Lomatia tasmanica , depending on which age estimates you believe.

Re:It's not the oldest living organism

[Trepidity]

This is arguing something different--- not that it's the earliest-to-emerge species with still-living individuals, but that this particular individual is the oldest one still alive. That depends on your definition of "organism" and "individual" and such. Clonal colonies are a bit of an edge case--- they reproduce by continuously producing what could be seen as new individuals, or could be seen as just new branches of the original individual (they often come up from the same root system). To take a similar example, is Pando a single organism with a lot of trunks, which has been alive for tens of thousands of years; or is it a colony of individual trees, each of which has been around a lot less long?

And you can find even more edge cases--- there are stable mats of seagrass that might be 100,000-year-old organisms, if you consider clonal colonies to be individual organisms.

Re:It's not the oldest living organism

[Patch86]

I believe they mean oldest living organism, in the sense of oldest living individual creature, and not the species as a whole.

In other words, they have a specific plant which first sprouted nearly 50,000 years ago. If there's an individual horseshoe crab that is 50,000 years old I'd be very surprised.

Re:why whatcouldpossiblygowrong?

[Joe Tie.]

I might agree, except that I was delighted how close that tag came to "what could possibly grow wrong".

facts

[Anonymous Coward]

As a horticulturalist who's worked on tissue culture projects...

1- tissue culture is growing a piece of plant of a medium (usually agar with nutrients) through various stages

2- there is no universal formula and different plants need different nutrient and environmental mixes to go through each stage

3- you're trying to get this piece of plant to create a root and shoot system

4- it requires many different steps and setups/transplants to walk a piece of plant material through the stages to where you can actually put a piece of rooted material into the ground and know it will make a plant

5- you'd be amazed how picky (or impossible...so far) it is to coax a chunk of plant tissue into creating a whole new plant out of it's cells

Good Job

[laron]

So they cloned a plant that has hitherto successfully cloned itself for a thousands years without any help?

cloning = just taking cuttings

[Frogg]

it is worth noting that in horticulture 'cloning' is simply the technical name for the process of propagating a plant through the use of cuttings.

you need no lab to do it - just simply a pair of scissors (or a scalpel), some rooting gel/powder and a rooting medium (compost will do), and a healthy donor ('mother') plant to work from. using a propagation unit will also give better results (perhaps better still if it's heated). 'cloning' plants in this fashion is actually very easy to do - my mum's a keen gardener and she does it with all kinds of plants all the time (one poster here claims to have cloned a plant at age 6 - and i have no reason to doubt that at all!!).

cloning is the primary method used to produce lots of (genetically) identical baby plants for use in commercial growing of all kinds (including, afaiu, in the illegal production of marijuana)

personally, i don't think this is particularly newsworthy, even if they are doing this with one of the oldest plant species in the world.