Ice Age Flower Blossoms

Researchers have grown a Silene stenophylla from 30,000 year old placental tissues extracted from an ancient squirrel burrow deep under the Siberian permafrost.

Mammoths went extinct about 10 millennia ago, but a group of Russian, Japanese and U.S. scientists believe they can produce a baby mammoth from the DNA of a Pleistocene mammoth carcass by 2016 or 2017. The idea is to insert the mammoth DNA, presently preserved in a Russian lab, into the egg cells of an African elephant.

The field of plant biology is not sitting idly by. New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of American (PNAS) by scientists at the Institute of Cell Biophysics in Russia has created a stir. Through tissue culture and micropropagation, David Gilichinsky and his colleagues unearthed ?EUR??,,????'??regenerated fertile silene plants from the placental tissues of the disinterred fruits and transplanted the plants into pots in the laboratory, where, a year later, they blossomed, bore fruit, and set seed.?EUR??,,????'??

But the amazing part of the story is these revived fruits and seeds are from a time when wooly mammoths and saber-tooth cats roamed Siberia. We?EUR??,,????'???re talking about 30,000-year-old herbaceous flowering plants and seeds (Silene stenophylla) from fossil burrows of Arctic ground squirrels buried about 40 yards deep in the permafrost on a bank of the Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia!

The authors assert permafrost sediments might represent a rich source of wild plant species and ancient gene pools long believed extinct.

Source: Regeneration of whole fertile plants from 30,000-year-old fruit tissue buried in Siberian permafrost. Svetlana Yashina, et al. PNAS February 21, 2012.