Russian Scientists Revive Plant From 30,000-Year-Old Seeds

An anonymous reader writes "It was an Ice Age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species. The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds. ... 'The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber,' said Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study, who spent years rummaging through the area for squirrel burrows. 'It's a natural cryobank.'"

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Re:I saw this movie

[Samantha Wright]

For the curious, pretty much all plants carry out some degree of chemical warfare between each other and other organisms—from the obvious, like plant seeds full of cyanides, to more subtle things, like conifers acidifying the soil around them with their needles and roots to prevent anything else from growing (and much more subtle things still.) I don't know quite enough about Siberia thirty thousand years ago to make a good statement, but I would guess that it was a little more temperate than it currently is; in that case, it's probable that the plants from that era were chemically more aggressive, as the the availability of resources and the richness of the soil would have been higher.

Then again, one need only take this particular species further south to find out that it might very well be about average for the present day. Unfortunately there isn't enough historical expression information about plants to make a guess at the inflation rate (or deflation rate) over the long-term for plant toxicity in different ecosystems... but it could make a neat thesis topic.