Silene stenophylla growing in Magadan Oblast, Russia
This may be a little old but it's worth a throwback.
The silene stenophylla, a native plant from Serbia with white flowers, was revived from 32,000-year-old seeds by Russian scientists from the Institute of Cell Biophysics in 2012.
The seeds were found buried 124ft beneath permafrost in Siberia.
The team of researchers managed to regenerate a series of Silene stenophylla plants from the 32,000-year-old seed pods.
Details of their achievement were published in the paper titled 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'.
Some years after the successful regeneration, Austrian scientists tried to map the genomes of the age-old plants to determine how the seeds were able to survive for so long.
The mature and immature seeds, which had been entirely encased in ice, were unearthed from 124 feet (38 meters) below the permafrost, surrounded by layers that included mammoth, bison, and woolly rhinoceros bones.
The seeds, which were encased in ice, were surrounded by layers that included mammoth, bison, and woolly rhinoceros bones, according to National Geographic.
Scientists used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the batch of mature and immature seeds recovered from the permfrost.
Despite being 124 feet below ice, the seeds were put to full use by the scientists who extracted the tissue and then germinated it in glass vials.
“Late Pleistocene plant tissue of S. stenophylla, naturally preserved in permafrost, can be regenerated using tissue culture and micropropagation to form healthy sexually reproducing plants,” the published study said.
The achievement turned out to be the oldest regenerated plant, beating a Judean date palm dating to about 2,000 years ago.
