They brought an acacia seed to life after 151 years

When the French had just started building the Suez canal, a seed ripened on an acacia tree in the Egyptian desert. 151 years later, it came to life in a laboratory at Linköping University.

In 1856, Oskar Theodor Sandahl, a physician Stockholm, travelled to Egypt to cure a problem with his trachea – it may have been tuberculosis. Just like Carl von Linné and other physicians of the time, he was also interested in biology – especially botany. Whilst travelling in the country, he collected plants, seeds, insects and other creatures.
His collection was shipped home – each item carefully packed and labelled in glass jars – and deposited in the drug museum at Karolinska Institutet. For over a hundred years, the seeds were moved back and forth until finally ending up at their final home at Nordiska Museet in Stockholm.

It was not until 2007 that someone took an interest in examining them more closely – would it be possible to get such old seeds to grow?
“As with the seeds of other desert plants, acacia seeds have great longevity. They need to be able to lie in dry desert sand year after year, waiting for rain”, says Matti Leino, doctor of genetics and plant breeding at Nordiska Museet and guest researcher at Linköping University.
He started a project together with molecular geneticist Johan Edqvist for analysing DNA and testing the germinating power of 30 seeds from five different kinds of acacia, some of which no longer belong to the genus.

Matti Leino and Johan Edqvist

In April 2008, 151 years and five months after being collected in Egypt, the first seeds were sown in bowls of sterile sand. They were placed in a special climate-controlled room in Linköping University’s biology department at 20 degrees Celsius, with 16 hours of daylight each day, a little water and no extra nutrition.
After just two weeks, the first sprout emerged from the sand – a seed from an acacia aroma (A.farnesiana). Within a few weeks, two more little seedlings were reaching out towards the light.
There were no more seeds that germinated during the 100-day experiment, and, today, a single robust specimen remains and can be seen at the orangery in Julita, Nordiska Museet’s garden in Sörmland.
It is a world-record class result: only a few publications report successful attempts at germination using seeds of that age.

Studying the DNA of old seeds can provide information about how plant species evolve over time. Through plant breeding, mankind has changed the properties of his crops, with inevitable consequences for diversity.
“We can see that the genetic variation is much more limited today than it is in the old kinds of grain. Technology can also provide an explanation as to what it is that creates the properties we try to achieve”, says Matti Leino.
The new research results show that seed collections and herbaria are to be viewed as more than mere curiosities. They are also biobanks for research in plant genetics.

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Last updated: Fri Jan 20 16:27:43 CET 2012