OAP (Old Age Plant)

The oldest plant ever to be regenerated has been grown from 32,000-year-old seeds.

(A) Plant grown in vitro culture from seed of a modern plant. (B) Plant regenerated in vitro culture from tissue of fossil fruit with primary strictly female flower. (C) Plant regenerated from tissue of fossil fruit with both female (f) and bisexual (b) flowers.

A Russian team discovered a seed cache of Silene stenophylla, a flowering plant native to Siberia, that had been buried by an Ice Age squirrel near the banks of the Kolyma River. Radiocarbon dating confirmed that the seeds were 32,000 years old. 

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 mature seeds had been damaged - perhaps by the squirrel itself, to prevent them from germinating in the burrow. But some of the immature seeds retained viable plant material. The team extracted that tissue from the frozen seeds, placed it in vials, and successfully germinated the plants, according to a new study. The plants - identical to each other but with different flower shapes from modern S. stenophylla - grew, flowered, and, after a year, created seeds of their own. 

The new study suggests that permafrost could be a "depository for an ancient gene pool," a place where any number of now extinct species could be found and resurrected. Regenerated-seed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.