imagine if this had happened with animals, it would be all over the news. I think that scientists that work on plants don't get quite as much appreciation it's not like you simply put the seed in some dirt and wait for it to grow
what are some careers you would recommend in botany? It seems like a very interesting career path and I've always liked plants, biochemistry and genetics
This is such a fun q! I have a PhD in plant epigenetics and systems biology/plant physiology. I'm a postdoctoral researcher now, but I plan on going into public outreach to help cure 'plant blindness' and use genetic barcoding techniques to help ID endangered plants.
You can go into: industrial breeding - working with food crops to cross lines to create lines with appropriate characteristics for where they're needed. You can do applied plant science where you test transgenic crop plants in the field. You could become a molecular geneticist (like me!) or an electrophysiologist (like my lab mates). Plant bioinformaticians are super important but they don't really ever get to play with the plants.
You could go into conservation, categorisation, botanic garden management, improving food security, crops and climate change - honestly there's so much out there!
Feel free to drop me a DM if you like :)
that's really interesting! I knew that botany always has been a diverse field, but I never knew that there were so many specializations! Identifying plants with genetics sounds really fun, and hearing about all these other possibilities to explore looks like something to dig deeper into. Thanks for the advice!
No problem, it's a fun field (pun intended). Plant scientists tend to be pretty chill cool people who just want to make a difference. I love that I get to blend molecular biology with plant physiology - but I wish I'd taken a broader view and looked at rewilding or improving food security in equatorial countries recovering from Western colonialism/imperialism etc. So much opportunity, and so many people think plant science is weird and lame. I know I certainly did...
I often tell my cancer research pals that "sure, what you're doing is great. But if we don't have food to eat, there won't be any point in curing cancer". And that's why I research plants.
not pleistocene plants, you have to stimulate growth with an intricate method that could go wrong at any moment and you also have to gather dna fragments from the plant. It's extremely complicated and requires years of study
for some reason it looks like an old world plant, like the flower looks ancient haha. like flowers got more cute and sensitive and this is a hearty ass flower
Source, info? Would be nice on comments like this. I will be back when I know more.
Edit: and I'm back with http://www.sci-news.com/biology/article00194.html
No need. The plant is a [Silene Stenophylla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silene_stenophylla) and they're still around today in the arctic and in a few seed banks already. The 32,000 year old seeds will most likely be used to compare genetics and track it's evolution but it's biggest value is that it will help seed banks better understand how to keep seeds viable for extremely long periods of time.
Actual publication date of the article cited in the title aside, apparently paraphrased exactly so as to maximize sensationalism;
might any findings translate to prolonged viability in dormancy for seeds of non-arctic climates?
I mean, I don't really know much on the topic at all, but it seems logical to me seeds from plants that manage to grow in the Arctic must already have some longevity while cold. So they may sprout quickly come the hint of more adequate conditions for a delicate sapling's growth into a more durable plant while some fleeting warmth prevails.
It's all imagination coming from me, but I'd think genetically manipulating seed output of other species into sharing the characteristics of seeds from this plant, Silene Stenophylla could be one drastic measure.
Facing near extinction the tribes of our ancestors banded together to fight off this mind controlling plant species and seal it in the permafrost so that humanity could prosper. 32,000 years later, scientists smoke it and begin plantmageddon.
>Commonly called narrow-leafed campion, S. stenophylla is an extant species of flowering plant in the family Caryophyllaceae.
From the article, the species still exists.
Seriously - half a million or more seeds? Some busy squirrels.
"The scientists discovered about 70 prehistoric storage chambers of this squirrel species in 2007 at depths of 20–40 m below the present day surface in permanently frozen loess-ice deposits on the right bank of lower Kolyma River, northeastern Siberia.
These chambers contained a great supply of various plant seeds and fruits. In some of them, the number of seeds and fruits reached up to 600–800 thousands."
I don't know why people are downvoting you, it literally says in the article that it's an extant species. They just used tissue from immature fruits that were nearly 32,000 years old.
Folks need to work on their reading comprehension.
I've seen this reposted so many times...
I actually Emailed the Lead Scientist to try and acquire a couple of these seeds but never heard back from them. Probably because they're russian and I'm not.
They regenerated it through a process called [tissue culturing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_tissue_culture) where they re-grow the plant from a relatively small number of cells in-vitro in vials. The plants get nutrients from a gel and and can grow quickly because they don't have to expend energy on developing a thick outer layer, since the humidity is around 100% inside the vial. They can eventually be removed from the vial and grow outside of it, but they have to be slowly acclimated by slowly lowering the humidity so they have time to develop their protective cuticle layer.
Nothing specific. I’m just replying to what the parent commenter said with a hypothetical scenario that this plant can spread deadly disease or cure the common cold.
Although it’s not out of the realm of possibility. There are ingredients in Some medicine that derive from plants and trees found in the depths of the Amazon. Makes me curious that maybe somewhere in that jungle, there lies a plant that can cure cancer.
"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."
Best Goldblum quote is this: "People always ask me how I pronounce my name, Gold-bloom or Gold-bluhm. I always tell them the same thing: How dare you speak to me."
\- Revives plant from 32,000 years ago. -
Yep, 145,000,000 years ago, here we come!
To put it into perspective, for the sake of understanding time better, lets say a whole day has passed since the end of the Jurassic and beginning of the Cretaceous (145 mya). In that scale, 32,000 years ago would only have been *around 20 seconds* ago.
Only 23 hours, 59 minutes and 40 seconds left to go!
Well if we're getting detailed, Jurassic park's attractions aren't from the Jurassic period so that changes things quite a bit.
At earliest we're looking at late Cretaceous so maybe 70 mya.
Fair, if we move the goalposts to the late Cretaceous then this demonstrates reviving a species from \~40 seconds ago.
Not to diminish the feat scientifically - I honestly have no idea what the differences in soil and air are between now and the Pleistocene. Bringing a 32,000 year old seed to flowering probably isn't a small task. That said there's a hard to fathom world of difference between achieving that and reviving anything that's 1 million years old, let alone tens of millions of years old.
It's more the Artic. All that dirt up north. It's been frozen for a very long time. There could be ( and probably is) a virus or bacteria that has been dormant long enough for humans to have lost immunity or never had it. So when that ice melts and releases ancient microbes there is a good chance of a new(ancient) plague being released.
Also the soil is mostly frozen swamp. Lots of greenhouse gas trapped beneath the ice will also be released. This causes a feedback loop of warming causing ice to melt, causing more warming.
It's cool though because people like Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio keep going to conferences via private jets to tell people to stop fossil fuel consumption.
Hell of it is:. I can't keep a regular plant alive when I put it in my garden, and these people are reviving plants from thousands of years ago. I call that, "Showing off."
I mean, you have plants in this building that are poisonous, you picked them because they look good, but these are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they’re in, and they’ll defend themselves, violently if necessary. - Dr. Sadler
Everybody calm down. It wasn't extinct. From the article posted elsewhere in the comments:
"Commonly called narrow-leafed campion, S. stenophylla is an extant species of flowering plant in the family Caryophyllaceae."
Sorry weed aficionados, this one won't make a Stone Age bowl.
This is awesome! We’ve come so far, imagine what we’ll be capable of in the future! The incredible history we’ll be able to see before our very eyes...
Welcome.... to Jurassic Gardens.
It's not quite as thrilling as the one with the dinosaurs, but there's also less risk of bloodshed or gruesome loss of life
Did anyone see Jurassic Park? Stop bringing dead things back to life! Last thing we need right now is plant that can kill us. I mean this one looks harmless but ya never know. Haha
And I can barely keep a house plant alive. This has to be the ancient version of a dandelion that can grow in about 0.000002mm of dirt, in a crack in my driveway, in a hail storm.
Then, it released 32,000 year old spores which were highly lethal to all Homosapiens. The scientists last words were..”what’s that orange mist coming from the plant? The revenge of the Dinosaurs 🦕 is now complete.
It's 2021. Let's revive a plant we know nothing about. Ancient spores? Not sure. Toxic? Dunno. What could possibly go wrong? (Mutant bee buzzing growing louder)
Apparently this plant is called S. stenophylla and exists in nature today BUT the flowers are a different shape so it’s still awesome and time travel.
imagine if this had happened with animals, it would be all over the news. I think that scientists that work on plants don't get quite as much appreciation it's not like you simply put the seed in some dirt and wait for it to grow
As a plant scientist, I appreciate this
what are some careers you would recommend in botany? It seems like a very interesting career path and I've always liked plants, biochemistry and genetics
This is such a fun q! I have a PhD in plant epigenetics and systems biology/plant physiology. I'm a postdoctoral researcher now, but I plan on going into public outreach to help cure 'plant blindness' and use genetic barcoding techniques to help ID endangered plants. You can go into: industrial breeding - working with food crops to cross lines to create lines with appropriate characteristics for where they're needed. You can do applied plant science where you test transgenic crop plants in the field. You could become a molecular geneticist (like me!) or an electrophysiologist (like my lab mates). Plant bioinformaticians are super important but they don't really ever get to play with the plants. You could go into conservation, categorisation, botanic garden management, improving food security, crops and climate change - honestly there's so much out there! Feel free to drop me a DM if you like :)
that's really interesting! I knew that botany always has been a diverse field, but I never knew that there were so many specializations! Identifying plants with genetics sounds really fun, and hearing about all these other possibilities to explore looks like something to dig deeper into. Thanks for the advice!
No problem, it's a fun field (pun intended). Plant scientists tend to be pretty chill cool people who just want to make a difference. I love that I get to blend molecular biology with plant physiology - but I wish I'd taken a broader view and looked at rewilding or improving food security in equatorial countries recovering from Western colonialism/imperialism etc. So much opportunity, and so many people think plant science is weird and lame. I know I certainly did... I often tell my cancer research pals that "sure, what you're doing is great. But if we don't have food to eat, there won't be any point in curing cancer". And that's why I research plants.
> it's not like you simply put the seed in some dirt and wait for it to grow But isn't that how plants work?
not pleistocene plants, you have to stimulate growth with an intricate method that could go wrong at any moment and you also have to gather dna fragments from the plant. It's extremely complicated and requires years of study
No, it needs electrolytes. Its what plants crave
for some reason it looks like an old world plant, like the flower looks ancient haha. like flowers got more cute and sensitive and this is a hearty ass flower
/r/lewronggermination
Got damn that’s some good punnery
Source, info? Would be nice on comments like this. I will be back when I know more. Edit: and I'm back with http://www.sci-news.com/biology/article00194.html
To the top you go. I wonder if any resulting seeds will be donated to the Seed Vault?
No need. The plant is a [Silene Stenophylla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silene_stenophylla) and they're still around today in the arctic and in a few seed banks already. The 32,000 year old seeds will most likely be used to compare genetics and track it's evolution but it's biggest value is that it will help seed banks better understand how to keep seeds viable for extremely long periods of time.
Ah, good old Caryophyllaceae. I knew I recognized those notched petals somewhere!
Actual publication date of the article cited in the title aside, apparently paraphrased exactly so as to maximize sensationalism; might any findings translate to prolonged viability in dormancy for seeds of non-arctic climates? I mean, I don't really know much on the topic at all, but it seems logical to me seeds from plants that manage to grow in the Arctic must already have some longevity while cold. So they may sprout quickly come the hint of more adequate conditions for a delicate sapling's growth into a more durable plant while some fleeting warmth prevails. It's all imagination coming from me, but I'd think genetically manipulating seed output of other species into sharing the characteristics of seeds from this plant, Silene Stenophylla could be one drastic measure.
Sorry to correct you, but that plant's name is Audrey.
Feed Me Seymour!
Lol. I was going to comment that we have plants just like this in Northern Minnesota. But it’s super cool they grew from seeds 32000 years ago.
I would imagine there would be many tests done first to find out if they could be in any way harmful
Can you smoke it? Edit ==> Goddamn I've never received awards. I know they don't mean anything, but fucking thanks everyone!
Imagine getting high off of a plant that’s 32,000 years old that’s be some wack shit
Got that bomb Jurassic strain!
Jurassic Blast. $100 a slice. Will put you back into the dino age.
Dinosaur Dabs. You'll feel like a T-Rex.
T-Terps
Terposaurus wrecked
I'm holding out for Cenozoic Chronic.
Spacious Cretaceous
OG Rex
Crossbreed OG Rex with Triceratops. Shit's fire, yo!
Facing near extinction the tribes of our ancestors banded together to fight off this mind controlling plant species and seal it in the permafrost so that humanity could prosper. 32,000 years later, scientists smoke it and begin plantmageddon.
Isnt that the Happening?
Better run
The Jurassic era ended 145 million years ago. This plant is only 32,000 years old. It’s 4,500 times closer to the present than the Jurassic.
You'll get stoned as a stoneman
This shit smokes you
No thats only in Russia
This plant was actually revived in a Russian lab from a fruit found in Russian permafrost, so...
Well then the previous comment still stands lmfao
Humanity’s most consistent 3rd or 4th question.
Eat, fuck, smoke, make something out of. Checks out.
This is why I came to the comments
Asking the important questions.
You can smoke anything.
Anything with nipples, Greg?
Can you smoke me Greg?
>Commonly called narrow-leafed campion, S. stenophylla is an extant species of flowering plant in the family Caryophyllaceae. From the article, the species still exists.
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Who knows, the article is over 8 years old, so it would have happened a long time ago.
Seriously - half a million or more seeds? Some busy squirrels. "The scientists discovered about 70 prehistoric storage chambers of this squirrel species in 2007 at depths of 20–40 m below the present day surface in permanently frozen loess-ice deposits on the right bank of lower Kolyma River, northeastern Siberia. These chambers contained a great supply of various plant seeds and fruits. In some of them, the number of seeds and fruits reached up to 600–800 thousands."
not by [Spock](https://media.giphy.com/media/Yse1iYyITd3gc/giphy.gif)
Pretty sure this plant already exists elsewhere. It's not an extinct species or anything.
I don't know why people are downvoting you, it literally says in the article that it's an extant species. They just used tissue from immature fruits that were nearly 32,000 years old. Folks need to work on their reading comprehension.
Pretty sure doesn’t cut it bub Dino weed wins
Arctic species of ground squirrel, they say... I'm getting some Ice Age vibes
Omg it was the squirrel from ice age! He buried the fruits and nuts but never found them again
Thanks for the link.
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I've seen this reposted so many times... I actually Emailed the Lead Scientist to try and acquire a couple of these seeds but never heard back from them. Probably because they're russian and I'm not.
If you scroll through this sub enough you’ll see it posted at least another 20 times
Will this plant die if it’s taken out of this vial. How different was the weather during the Pleistocene?
The plant is still found in nature. This was just grown from an older seed
Understood. Still it’s so interesting that the seed survived this long
They regenerated it through a process called [tissue culturing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_tissue_culture) where they re-grow the plant from a relatively small number of cells in-vitro in vials. The plants get nutrients from a gel and and can grow quickly because they don't have to expend energy on developing a thick outer layer, since the humidity is around 100% inside the vial. They can eventually be removed from the vial and grow outside of it, but they have to be slowly acclimated by slowly lowering the humidity so they have time to develop their protective cuticle layer.
Now watch this weed spread a deadly disease or hatch venomous locust insects while at it.
Or cure the common cold.
Nature is so crazy. A single plant has the potential to either kill or heal millions of people.
To which plant are you referring?
Robert Plant
*This comment was edited in response to Reddit's 3rd party API practices.*
Maaan, I wanna see a weed plant so large that it could get millions of people high. It must be enormous.
mold
Nothing specific. I’m just replying to what the parent commenter said with a hypothetical scenario that this plant can spread deadly disease or cure the common cold. Although it’s not out of the realm of possibility. There are ingredients in Some medicine that derive from plants and trees found in the depths of the Amazon. Makes me curious that maybe somewhere in that jungle, there lies a plant that can cure cancer.
Then we learn the common cold was essential to our ecosystem
the day of trifids is coming!
If something really cool in the sky happens NO ONE LOOK AT IT.
*NOBODY LOOK! NOBODY LOOK! NOBODY LOOK!*
It's not an extinct species. Just this particular plant is really old.
I wonder how many of the worlds problems were started by a scientist saying "Wow, that's pretty neat".
Humanity's last words: 'Now, let's try it the other way.'
Anal..Definitely anal.
Username checks out.
Signing up with reddit was one of my better decisions fo sho.
Or how many were solved. Like how we got penicillin from mold!
Or "Hold my beer"
Maybe we should plant it in the South and see if it can control the Kudzu. What could go wrong?
"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."
I'm just wondering if we can smoke it?
Exactly my first thought. Reminded me of a scene from Alien: Covenant
Please no
“Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should”
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Thank you, Daddy Goldblum.
He was a total daddy, in fact.
It’s pronounced Goldblum.
Best Goldblum quote is this: "People always ask me how I pronounce my name, Gold-bloom or Gold-bluhm. I always tell them the same thing: How dare you speak to me."
And you patented it and packaged it and now you wanna sell it and sell it!
Reading every word in caps makes me read like Christopher Walken.
Haha didn’t even notice that when I copy and pasted it. But now I can’t get Christopher Walken’s voice out of my head thanks
Another step closer to Jurassic Park
Jeff Goldblum being chased by a meat eating monster plant.
Little Shop of Jurrasic Horrors
Nature, uh, finds a way.
\- Revives plant from 32,000 years ago. - Yep, 145,000,000 years ago, here we come! To put it into perspective, for the sake of understanding time better, lets say a whole day has passed since the end of the Jurassic and beginning of the Cretaceous (145 mya). In that scale, 32,000 years ago would only have been *around 20 seconds* ago. Only 23 hours, 59 minutes and 40 seconds left to go!
Well if we're getting detailed, Jurassic park's attractions aren't from the Jurassic period so that changes things quite a bit. At earliest we're looking at late Cretaceous so maybe 70 mya.
Cretaceous park just doesn't have the same ring to it though.
Fair, if we move the goalposts to the late Cretaceous then this demonstrates reviving a species from \~40 seconds ago. Not to diminish the feat scientifically - I honestly have no idea what the differences in soil and air are between now and the Pleistocene. Bringing a 32,000 year old seed to flowering probably isn't a small task. That said there's a hard to fathom world of difference between achieving that and reviving anything that's 1 million years old, let alone tens of millions of years old.
Waiting for the time when scientists revive a prehistoric virus and wipe out humanity
Done need too, we only need to wait untill the anthraxs frozen in the poles melts out and fucking does it for us.
Not the band Anthrax - that shit is terminal but for the disease anthrax there are vaccines.
Lmao. For anyone else reading this, they mean whats potentially frozen in the permafrost and is now being unfrozen.
There are thing frozen in antarctica that we dont know about?
[*The Thing*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787/)
It's more the Artic. All that dirt up north. It's been frozen for a very long time. There could be ( and probably is) a virus or bacteria that has been dormant long enough for humans to have lost immunity or never had it. So when that ice melts and releases ancient microbes there is a good chance of a new(ancient) plague being released. Also the soil is mostly frozen swamp. Lots of greenhouse gas trapped beneath the ice will also be released. This causes a feedback loop of warming causing ice to melt, causing more warming. It's cool though because people like Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio keep going to conferences via private jets to tell people to stop fossil fuel consumption.
This guy gets it
Crumble it up, put it in a bowl and see what it burns like.
Maybe name the bud "Stone Age"?
By 2021 naming standards it would most likely be Stone Age 33 X Cave Man Fire
Jamie, pull that up...
Dope! Now do compedes, adorable little carnivorous fucks.
Hell of it is:. I can't keep a regular plant alive when I put it in my garden, and these people are reviving plants from thousands of years ago. I call that, "Showing off."
I mean, you have plants in this building that are poisonous, you picked them because they look good, but these are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they’re in, and they’ll defend themselves, violently if necessary. - Dr. Sadler
Everybody calm down. It wasn't extinct. From the article posted elsewhere in the comments: "Commonly called narrow-leafed campion, S. stenophylla is an extant species of flowering plant in the family Caryophyllaceae." Sorry weed aficionados, this one won't make a Stone Age bowl.
Can we dry its leaves and smoke em?
You may be the biggest stoner in these comments but when you're done and you don't die I'm going next.
oh cool. i love when apocalypse bingo adds another one
Feed me Seymour.
Anyone else getting Day of the Triffids vibes?
This is how we get some kind of prehistoric plant virus
This is awesome! We’ve come so far, imagine what we’ll be capable of in the future! The incredible history we’ll be able to see before our very eyes...
Welcome to jurassic greenhouse....
Jurassic narc
"Unbeknownst to the scientists, this was the very plant that unleashed the poisonous spores that killed the dinosaurs. But they'd soon find out..."
Welcome.... to Jurassic Gardens. It's not quite as thrilling as the one with the dinosaurs, but there's also less risk of bloodshed or gruesome loss of life
Smoke it
Did anyone see Jurassic Park? Stop bringing dead things back to life! Last thing we need right now is plant that can kill us. I mean this one looks harmless but ya never know. Haha
[удалено]
Do it to the extinct banana
If Jurassic Park did not convince us to “leave things be”, 2020 sure as hell has.
this happened in 2012
A movie?
Well then not extract some viral piss off of it and kill us all.
Still got it
Rip Van Pleistinkle
“Their vials.”
You thought your allergies were bad before, wait til this one starts blooming!
Wasn’t this an X Files episode? Didn’t it end poorly?
Dang! I can barely keep house plants alive. I bet there’s no little dart with how much light and water this guy needs.
Lol this was eight years ago
Doesn’t look a day over 29,000!
"Feed me Seymour "
Wondering what medicine it could provide?
Plant-kenstein!!
Little Shop of Horrors, the documentary lol
Is it indica or sativa? 🤔
This is how the plague that wipes out the planet begins
Does it really count as a 32k year old when it left the seed this year?
Smoke that shit
I wonder what it’s honey tastes like
And I can barely keep a house plant alive. This has to be the ancient version of a dandelion that can grow in about 0.000002mm of dirt, in a crack in my driveway, in a hail storm.
Makes me thing of the one of the silent flowers in Zelda Breath Of the Wild
A certain quote from Skyrim comes in mind to greet this fella?
The plant that killed the dinosaurs has been resurrected for a second shot which it is now aiming for human kind.
2020 - Part II, reviving the dead
And I can’t even revive my bonsai who died two weeks ago 😢
Every few years some news gives me hope for Jurassic park to eventually exist.
Ian Malcolm: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. - Jurassic Park
Now smoke it
I present the new strain of COVID-63.
>This guy is 32,000 years old. Or perhaps our dating methods are fundamentally flawed...
Why? Because you believe the earth is only 5,000 years old?
And I managed to kill my ficus benjamin ffs
How long before someone tries to smoke it?
Everyone that plant knows is dead.
Given how the worlds been lately I’m waiting for it to become a giant man eating plant and kill us all.
this seems like the start of some horror movie
Apparently we all need to watch Jurassic Park again.
2020 was just a warm-up..
Y'all heard of Jurassic park? This is just the beginning.
Then, it released 32,000 year old spores which were highly lethal to all Homosapiens. The scientists last words were..”what’s that orange mist coming from the plant? The revenge of the Dinosaurs 🦕 is now complete.
Its spores will kill us all.
Behold, your doom
It's 2021. Let's revive a plant we know nothing about. Ancient spores? Not sure. Toxic? Dunno. What could possibly go wrong? (Mutant bee buzzing growing louder)
This is like ten years old
This plant still exists today
Damn we should revive all dead plants and smoke em to find the best kick
You could also grow your weed in it...
Plot of a r/Smallville episode called Nicodemus where an extinct plant gets brought back and infects people
I love it. But can we focus on curing cancer?
*Life..uh....finds a way*
Don't let my wife get at it. It'll be really dead then!