#silene stenophylla

[dokupine]

reach inside, she misses you

[whattolearntoday]

A bit of February 20th history...

1792 - US postal service created, postage 6-12 cents depending on distance

1809 - US Supreme Court rules federal government power greater than any state 

1872 - NY’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opens (pictured)

1941 - 1st transport of Jews to concentration camps leaves Poland

1994 - Pope John Paul II demands juristic discrimination of homosexuals

2012 - Scientists successfully regenerate the flowering plant, Silene stenophylla from a 31,800 year old piece of fruit

[notesfromanisland]

Scientists in Russia raise plants from fruit stored away by squirrels 30,000 years ago, smashing the previous age record.

[kutupmizikasi]

Yukarıdaki çiçeğin bilimsel adı Silene stenophylla, kendisi Karanfilgiller ailesinin bir üyesi. Genç durduğuna bakmayın hepimizden yaşlı, 30000 yaşında.  Radyokarbon metoduyla elde edilen verilere göre ± 300'lük bir sapma ile 31800 yaşında olduğu tespit edilmiş. Sibirya’da 38 metre derinlikteki bir fosil sincap yuvasında tortuları hala çözülmemiş olarak bulunmuş. Daha sonra in vitro doku kültürü ve klonal mikropropagasyon(mikroçoğaltım) ile tekrar büyümesi sağlanmış. in vitro; laboratuvar ortamında ya da yapay koşullarda manası taşıyan bir terim.  Sonra aynı bölgedeki modern aynı türlere bakıldığında farklı fenotipleri olduğu ortaya çıkmış. Yani zamanla oluşan çevresel etkiler sayesinde dış görünüşlerinde farklılıklar oluşmuş. Tekrar yeşertilen Silene stenophylla’dan elde edilen tohumlardan yetiştirilen ilk nesil geliştirilmiş ve ana bitkiyle aynı morfolojik(biçimsel) özelliklere sahip olduğu gözlemlenmiş. Durumu özetler isek; bilmem kaç milyon yıl önce yaşamış dedenizle karşılaşıyorsunuz, görünüş olarak çok farklısınız ve o yaşına rağmen sizden hala genç.

İlgili Pnas makalesi içtedir.  Daha fazla bilgi için araştırın.

[indefenseofplants]

Germinating a Seed after 32,000 Years

What you are looking at are plants that were grown from seeds buried in permafrost for nearly 32,000 years. The seeds were discovered on the banks of the Kolyma River in Siberia. The river is eroding into the permafrost and uncovering frozen Pleistocene relics. Researchers took the seeds and did the unthinkable - they grew them into adult plants. To date, this is the oldest resurrected plant material.  The key to their extreme longevity lies in the permafrost. They were found inside the frozen burrow of an Arctic ground squirrel. The state of the burrow suggests that everything froze quite rapidly. As such, the seeds remained in a state of suspended animation for 32,000 years. This is not the first time viable plant materials have been recovered from Pleistocene permafrost. Spores, mosses, as well as seeds of other flowering plants have been somewhat rejuvenated in the past but none of these were grown to maturity.  Using micropropagation techniques coupled with tissue cultures, researchers were able to grow and flower the 32,000 year old seeds. What they discovered was that these seeds belonged to a plant that can still be found in the Arctic today. It is a small species in the family Caryophyllaceae called Silene stenophylla. However, there were some differences.  As it turns out, the seeds taken from the burrow proved to be a distinct phenotype from extant S. stenophylla populations. Though there are many possible reasons for this, it certainly hints at the different environmental parameters faced by this species through time. What's more, such findings allow us a unique window into the world of seed dormancy. Researchers are now looking at such cases to better inform how we can preserve seeds for longer periods of time.  Photo Credit: Svetlana Yashinaa, Stanislav Gubin, Stanislav Maksimovich, Alexandra Yashina, Edith Gakhova, and David Gilichinsky Further Reading: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/10/4008.full

[newstfionline]

Russians revive Ice Age flower from frozen burrow

By Vladimir Isachenkov, AP, Feb 20, 2012 MOSCOW (AP)--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 experiment proves that permafrost serves as a natural depository for ancient life forms, said the Russian researchers, who published their findings in Tuesday's issue of "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" of the United States.

Svetlana Yashina of the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy Of Sciences, who led the regeneration effort, said the revived plant looked very similar to its modern version, which still grows in the same area in northeastern Siberia.

The Russian research team recovered the fruit after investigating dozens of fossil burrows hidden in ice deposits on the right bank of the lower Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia, the sediments dating back 30,000-32,000 years.

The sediments were firmly cemented together and often totally filled with ice, making any water infiltration impossible--creating a natural freezing chamber fully isolated from the surface.

"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."

The burrows were located 125 feet (38 meters) below the present surface in layers containing bones of large mammals, such as mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, bison, horse and deer.

Gubin said the study has demonstrated that tissue can survive ice conservation for tens of thousands of years, opening the way to the possible resurrection of Ice Age mammals.

"If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue," Gubin told the AP. "And this path could lead us all the way to mammoth."

[monohedron]

[nybg]

Ancient Plants Brought Back to Life After 30,000 Years

After 30,000 years spent squirreled away (quite literally) in the permafrost of Siberia, ancient Silene stenophylla--or narrow-leafed campion--has found new life in 2012.

A team from the Institute of Cell Biophysics was successful in resurrecting the plant not through its intact, mature seeds, but by "placental" material pulled from the fruits themselves. The possibility that sucrose in the fruit acted as a preservative for its cells is of particular interest to the scientific community. But there's more to it than that:

Silene stenophylla still grows on the Siberian tundra; and when the researchers compared modern-day plants against their resurrected cousins, they found subtle differences in the shape of petals and the sex of flowers, for reasons that are not evident.

The scientists suggest in their PNAS paper that research of this kind can help in studies of evolution, and shed light on environmental conditions in past millennia.

While scientists are still working on bringing woolly mammoth's back from the ice, the success of this ancient campion spells out an interesting future for other plants--particularly those that have gone extinct. That's assuming, of course, that the subjects botanists hope to revive happened to be on the squirrel's menu thousands of years ago. --MN