Plants grown from Late Pleistocene-age fruit

New York Times : Russian scientists claim to have grown plants from the fruit of a campion flower that died 32 000 years ago. Svetlana Yashina and David Gilichinsky, of the Russian Academy of Sciences research center at Pushchino, near Moscow, and colleagues published their findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The fruit had been excavated several years ago from an arctic ground squirrel’s burrow in northeastern Siberia. To grow the plants, the scientists used cells from the fruit’s placenta after failing to germinate the seeds. They obtained the radiocarbon date from the seeds, however. If the group’s claim is true, it would enable scientists to study evolution in real time by comparing the ancient and living campions, writes Nicholas Wade for the New York Times.