Scientist Sprouts Fresh Plant From Ancient Seeds

March 14 -- Jane Shen-Miller's garden consists of two plants that, for the moment, seem to be doing pretty well.

But she watches over them day and night, like a mother nursing a sick child, because those plants could hold key secrets about longevity and good health, not only for other plants but quite possibly for humans as well.

You see, these aren't just ordinary plants.

Secret to Long-Term Storage?

They were raised from seeds of the fabled lotus plant, and remarkably, they remained viable after spending nearly 500 years in a dry lakebed in China, subject to wind and sand storms, occasional flooding, and radiation. Shen-Miller, a plant biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, grew the plants from ancient seeds she collected from the lakebed in China, where she was born and raised.

They are the first mature plants ever raised from seeds known to be so old.

"Most seeds only live a few years," she says. To have remained viable for so long, the seeds must have some genetic mechanism that allows them to repair damage along the way. If she, or other scientists involved in her project, can figure out what it is, they might be able to transfer that same mechanism to other plants, thus facilitating long-term storage of crop seeds that now remain viable for only a few years.

That, alone, makes Shen-Miller's gardening efforts valuable, because more enduring seeds could improve farming in areas around the world, thus easing the constant threat of famine.

But for now, she's just trying to keep her plants alive.

"I'm very tenaciously watching my 466-year-old and my 408-year-old to see what I can do to make them stronger," she says. "They are standing straight up right now," but they are not nearly as healthy as modern lotus plants grown in her lab as controls, and that, she says, is troubling.

Big Effects of Little Radiation

Shen-Miller also collected soil from the lakebed, and a co-investigator on the project, Garman Harbottle, took the soil back to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he works as a chemist. The soil was found to be slightly radioactive and the scientists believe that low-level radiation, over such a long period, caused mutations within the seeds.