Seeds 200 Years Old Breathe Again

Seeds which have been stored away since the time of George III have been persuaded into new life.

Scientists from the Millennium Seed Bank, operated by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, have induced seeds from three species to germinate.

They had been brought to Britain from South Africa by a Dutch merchant in 1803, and were found in a notebook stored in the National Archives.

"They had been kept under pretty poor conditions," said Matt Daws, a seed ecologist with the Millennium Seed Bank, which is located at Wakehurst Place in West Sussex.

"They'd been in a ship for a year, certainly for months, coming back from the Cape; then they'd been kept in the Tower of London for a number of years. Only in the last 10 years have they been in controlled conditions.

"So I didn't expect any of them to germinate," he told the BBC News website, "and the three that did really are tough seeds."

We didn't have many options - it was a shot in the dark as to whether we'd be able to get things to work

The three successes are a legume, Liparia villosa, and two species not yet identified, one a protea and the other an acacia.

The Liparia did particularly well, with 16 out of the 25 seeds progressing into plants.

The acacia was a different proposition. "We only had two seeds to work with, and one of them turned out to have been eaten inside by an insect," recalled Dr Daws.

"What that means is we didn't have many options - it was a shot in the dark as to whether we'd be able to get things to work."

The Cape region is regularly visited by fire, which is a signal to germinate. So scientists mimicked the effects of fire by chipping off the hard coats of some seeds, and bubbling smoke over others.

Even with this detailed preparation, 29 of the 32 species represented declined to germinate.

These are not the oldest seeds ever tempted into life. Four years ago scientists in the US germinated lotus seeds which had been carbon-dated as 500 years old; more recently, an Israeli team claimed to have grown a date palm from a 2,000 year old seed.

Even though the Kew batch is much younger, the storage conditions appear to have been more difficult.

They were originally taken on board the Prussian ship Henriette by Jan Teerlink, a merchant bringing silk and tea from Java and China, as the ship stopped off at the Cape of Good Hope on its way back to Europe.

On the way back the Henriette was captured by the British navy; and Teerlink's possessions, including his notebook, passed to the High Court of Admiralty, and then to the Tower. Why he carried the seeds and why he put them between the pages of his notebook are unknown.

When the plants are older, the Kew scientists plan to make genetic and genomic analyses, and compare the old plants with modern-day equivalents, perhaps showing how Cape species have changed and adapted over the last two centuries.

Seed of extinct date palm sprouts after 2,000 years

Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
Sunday, June 12, 2005

(06-12) 04:00 PDT Kibbutz Ketura, Israel -- It has five leaves, stands 14 inches high and is nicknamed Methuselah. It looks like an ordinary date palm seedling, but for UCLA- educated botanist Elaine Solowey, it is a piece of history brought back to life.

Planted on Jan. 25, the seedling growing in the black pot in Solowey's nursery on this kibbutz in Israel's Arava desert is 2,000 years old -- more than twice as old as the 900-year-old biblical character who lent his name to the young tree. It is the oldest seed ever known to produce a viable young tree.

The seed that produced Methuselah was discovered during archaeological excavations at King Herod's palace on Mount Masada, near the Dead Sea. Its age has been confirmed by carbon dating. Scientists hope that the unique seedling will eventually yield vital clues to the medicinal properties of the fruit of the Judean date tree, which was long thought to be extinct.

Solowey, originally from San Joaquin (Fresno County), teaches at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura, where she has nurtured more than 100 rare or near-extinct species back to life as part of a 10-year project to study plants and herbs used as ancient cures.

In collaboration with the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Center at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, named in honor of its Southern California- based benefactor, Solowey grows plants and herbs used in Tibetan, Chinese and biblical medicine, as well as traditional folk remedies from other cultures to see whether their effectiveness can be scientifically proved.

In experiments praised by the Dalai Lama, for example, Borick Center Director Sarah Sallon has shown that ancient Tibetan cures for cardiovascular disease really do work.

The San Francisco Chronicle was granted the first viewing of the historic seedling, which sprouted about four weeks after planting. It has grown six leaves, but one has been removed for DNA testing so scientists can learn more about its relationship to its modern-day cousins.

The Judean date is chronicled in the Bible, Quran and ancient literature for its diverse powers -- from an aphrodisiac to a contraceptive -- and as a cure for a wide range of diseases including cancer, malaria and toothache.

For Christians, the palm is a symbol of peace associated with the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. The ancient Hebrews called the date palm the "tree of life" because of the protein in its fruit and the shade given by its long leafy branches. The Arabs said there were as many uses for the date palm as there were days in the year.

Greek architects modeled their Ionic columns on the tree's tall, thin trunk and curling, bushy top. The Romans called it Phoenix dactylifera -- "the date-bearing phoenix" -- because it never died and appeared to be reborn in the desert where all other plant life perished.

Now Solowey and her colleagues have brought this phoenix of the desert back to life after 2,000 years.

The ancient seeds were found 30 years ago during archeological excavations on Mount Masada, the mountaintop fortress on the shore of the Dead Sea where King Herod built a spectacular palace. When the Romans conquered Palestine and laid waste to the Temple in Jerusalem, Masada was the last stand of a small band of Jewish rebels who held out against three Roman legions for several years before committing mass suicide in A.D. 73.

Archaeologist Ehud Netzer found the seeds, which were identified by the department of botanical archaeology at Israel's Bar-Ilan University. Then they were placed in storage, where they lay for 30 years until Sallon heard about the cache.

"When we asked if we could try and grow some of them, they said, 'You're mad,' but they gave us three seeds," she said.

Sallon took the seeds to Solowey, who has cultivated more than 3,000 date palms and rarities like the trees that produce the fragrant resins frankincense and myrrh. Solowey admits she was skeptical about the chances of success with this project.

"When I received the seeds from Sarah, I thought the chances of this experiment succeeding were less than zero," said Solowey, cradling the precious seedling in a specially quarantined section of her nursery on the kibbutz. "But Dr. Sallon insisted and I took this very seriously. Lotus seeds over 1,000 years old have been sprouted, and I realized that no one had done any similar work with dates, so why not give it our best shot -- and we were rewarded."

The three seeds were long and thin, grayish-brown in color. Solowey soaked them in warm water, and then added gibberellic acid, a potent growth hormone used to induce germination in reluctant seeds. Next, she added a special rooting hormone for woody plants called T8 and an enzyme-rich fertilizer to supplement the natural food inside it. She then planted it in sterile potting soil on the Jewish festival of trees, which this year fell on Jan. 25.

Solowey placed the pots in her nursery and tended to them each day for a month, not expecting anything to happen.

"Much to my astonishment, after five weeks, a small little date shoot came up," she says. "It was pale, almost whitish green. The first two leaves were abnormal-looking. They were very flat and very pale. The third leaf started to have the striations of a normal date plant. Now it looks perfectly normal to me.

"The only difference between this date seedling and any other date seedlings I've seen come up is the length of the third leaf. This is very unusual," she said, pointing out one very long, thin leaf growing out of the pot.

"It's certainly the oldest tree seed that's ever been sprouted. Wheat seeds from pharaohs' tombs have been sprouted, but none of the plants have survived for very long. Before this, the oldest seed grown was a lotus from China, which was 1,200 years old," she said. "I'm very excited. I wasn't expecting anything to happen. I'm really interested in finding out what the DNA testing is going to show. I know that date seeds can stay alive for several decades. To find out that they can stay alive for millennia is astonishing."

Date palms are either male or female, but it's too early to tell the sex of Methuselah. Normally, female trees begin to bear fruit after about five years.

"We have to figure out where we can put it so it can grow to maturity. Then we'll hope that it grows up and flowers so we can figure out whether it's male or female, and then it has offshoots and seeds so we can propagate it. It's very exciting to think that maybe someday we can eat 2,000-year-old dates, but there's a 50 percent chance that it's a male, in which case that won't happen," she said.

Sallon trained as a pediatrician and gastroenterologist, and she once worked with Mother Teresa at the Sisters of Charity orphanage in Calcutta. She founded the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Center 10 years ago and is a world-renowned expert on the medical properties of plants. "It feels remarkable to see this seed growing, to see it coming out of the soil after 2, 000 years. It's a very moving and exciting moment," she said.

The two researchers hope the reborn tree will provide valuable information about the Judean economy and society at the time of Jesus.

Once the seed sprouted, samples of seeds excavated from the same cache on Masada were sent to the University of Zurich for radio-carbon dating. The results came back last week, showing the samples were 2,000 years old, plus or minus a margin of error of 50 years, placing them during or just before the Masada revolt.

"Perhaps one of our ancestors was sitting there on the battlements of Masada eating his dates while the Roman armies were preparing for the final siege and perhaps nonchalantly spitting out a pip," said Sallon. "Two thousand years later, here I am at Kibbutz Ketura and it's grown."

The sixth leaf has been sent to the Volcani Centre, Israel's agricultural research institute, for DNA testing by date palm expert Yuval Cohen.

"I find it remarkable," said Cohen. "Two thousand years ago, during the Roman Empire, Israel was known for the quality of its dates. They were famous throughout the Roman Empire. But date growing as a commercial fruit export stopped at the end of 70 A.D., when the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans. From then, the tradition was lost.

"It's an interesting question what were the ancient dates like. We hope by genetic analysis, we can learn more about the character of the ancient date population."

When the Romans invaded ancient Judea, thick forests of date palms towering up to 80 feet high and 7 miles wide covered the Jordan River valley from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the shores of the Dead Sea in the south. The tree so defined the local economy that Emperor Vespasian celebrated the conquest by minting the "Judea Capta," a special bronze coin that showed the Jewish state as a weeping woman beneath a date palm.

Today, nothing remains of those mighty forests. The date palms in modern Israel were imported, mainly from California. The ancient Judean date, renowned for its succulence and famed for its many medicinal properties, had been lost to history.

Until now.

(Thanks SpaceBar, I've been looking for this article for a long time)

250-Million-Year-Old Bacteria Revived in Lab

Spores were found deep in rock salt formation

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Thursday, October 19, 2000

Scientists drilling into a New Mexico rock formation deep underground have brought to life four unknown strains of bacteria that have lain entombed in salt crystals for 250 million years.

The bacteria, like many of their kind, form into long-lasting protective spores. The scientists were able to revive the spores until the microbes reproduced.

The report, by a team of biologists and geologists, has already fueled speculation that spores of living organisms might somehow be transported from planet to planet, across the galaxy and over eons. It is a concept known as "panspermia," which some see as a possible source for life arising on Earth.

At the very least, the report supports the idea that these microbes are the oldest living organisms ever discovered -- persisting on Earth unaltered through eons that have seen the drifting of continents, the upthrusting of mountains and the drying of ancient oceans.

Fossils of organisms that emerged and vanished long ago are common enough -- some, indeed, date back more than 3 billion years. But the only other confirmed find of ancient living bacteria came about five years ago when a California research team restored life to microbial spores that had lain inside the belly of a bee trapped in amber for 25 to 40 million years.

This latest discovery, reported today in the international scientific journal Nature, was written by biologists Russell H. Vreeland and William D. Rosenzweig of West Chester University in Pennsylvania and geologist Dennis W. Powers of Anthony, Texas.

"The potential implications are profound," said R. John Parkes, a microbiologist, chemist and earth scientist at Bristol University in England, in a commentary published in the same journal.

"Can spores be effectively immortal?" Parkes goes on to ask. "Where else on Earth, and to what depths, might ancient bacterial life be lurking? And, given this startling example of bacterial durability, do spores in rocks even provide a mechanism for life to be transported between planets by 'panspermia,' as has been proposed?"

Vreeland and his colleagues, however, don't speculate. Their report meticulously details how they probed the walls of an air shaft 1,850 feet deep in a huge cavern near Carlsbad, N.M. The site had been excavated by the Department of Energy and opened last year to store high-level radioactive waste from America's nuclear weapons program.

The cavern is within an immensely thick rock salt layer called the Permian Salado Formation that had been carefully dated at about 250 million years old. That work was done by Paul R. Renne and his colleagues at the Berkeley Geochronology Center, an independent research facility next to the University of California campus.

Vreeland and his colleagues, working from a cage suspended in the shaft, used a battery-powered handheld drill that was thoroughly sterilized to extract a core of rock containing salt crystals no bigger than postage stamps. Inside those crystals, Vreeland said in an interview yesterday, he found three tiny "fluid inclusions" -- microscopic bits of pristine water that had existed unchanged since the Salado Formation emerged from an ocean that predated the age of the dinosaurs.

Back in their sealed laboratory, and free from all possible outside contamination, Vreeland and Rosenzweig discovered the spores of bacteria inside the ancient saltwater, and after three months of careful culturing under the most sterile conditions, they succeeded in nurturing four strains of bacteria back to full-scale life.

None of the four strains has yet been identified, but the genes of one are known and have been compared with gene sequence records maintained by the federally sponsored GenBank, in Bethesda, Md. They have been found to be related to a living species of bacterium called Bacillus marismortui, which thrives in Israel's extremely salty Dead Sea.

The Vreeland team's work is financed by the National Science Foundation's program on "Life in Extreme Environments," where scientists examine how living organisms can exist in such extraordinary places as the depths of boiling geysers, the profound cold of Antarctic glaciers and even in the radiation-saturated depths of mines miles underground.

As for Vreeland, he and his colleagues have already bought the tools they need to hunt for more spore-forming bacteria. They will be heading inside a salt formation at least 500 million years old that lies beneath Lake Erie. Vreeland said he also hopes to probe still another formation near Vancouver, B.C., that may be as old as a billion years. In his search for ancient life, Vreeland said he is also eyeing a group of salt-containing meteorites now housed in a London museum.

"That's what you have to do," he said. "You have to keep pushing to see how long life can last."

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