Germinating a 2,000 year old seedling

A sapling germinated earlier this year from a 2,000-year-old date palm seed is thriving, according to a report on the National Geographic website.

"It's 80 centimeters high with nine leaves, and it looks great," said Sarah Sallon, director of the Hadassah Medical Organization's Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center (NMRC) in Jerusalem. Sallon's program is dedicated to the study of complementary medicines. The centre is also interested in conserving the heritage of Middle Eastern plants that have been used for thousands of years.

Sallon wants to see if the ancient tree, nicknamed Methuselah, has any unique medicinal properties no longer found in today's date palm varieties. "Dates were famous in antiquity for medicinal value," she said. "They were widely used for different kinds of diseases." She and her colleagues are currently comparing the structure of the sapling to modern date palms and examining DNA from one of the sapling's leaves. The team plans to publish preliminary results in a peer-reviewed journal early next year.

Several ancient date seeds were taken from an excavation at Masada, a historic mountainside fortress, in 1973. Carbon dating indicates the seeds are about 2,000 years old. Hebrew University archaeologist Ehud Netzer found the seeds and gave them to botanical archaeologist Mordechai Kislev at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. The seeds sat untouched in a drawer in Kislev's office until last November, when Sallon asked if she could have a few to pass on to desert agriculture expert Elaine Solowey.

I said, Thank you. What do you want me to do?" Solowey recalls. Told to germinate them, she said, "You want me to do what?" Solowey, director of the experimental orchard and the NMRC cultivation site at Kibbutz Ketura in Israel, focuses primarily on finding new crops that grow well in the arid Middle East climate.

Solowey chose Tu B'shevat (a Jewish holiday known as the New Year for Trees which fell on 25 January), to plant the seeds. She occasionally checked on the plants for a few months, and in March she noticed cracked soil in one of the pots—a sure sign of sprouts. "I couldn't believe it," she said. "I did everything to avoid contamination, so it had to be that seed. And by March 18 I could see it was a date shoot." The researchers are now repeating the experiment with another batch of the ancient seeds to see if their success was a "one in a million" stroke of luck or if their technique can more readily bring ancient seeds to life.

In ancient times the Judean date palm was a staple source of food, shelter, and shade. References to it are made in the Bible, the Koran, and other ancient literature. Judean date palms were wiped out by about A.D. 500. Today's date trees in Israel were imported during the 1950s and '60s from modern cultivated Iraqi, Moroccan, and Egyptian varieties, Sallon said. Solowey, who also works for Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, said it already appears the ancient plant has some interesting differences from modern dates.

If Methuselah bears fruit, Sallon and her colleagues will study its medicinal properties in hopes of better understanding what made the Judean date so famous in antiquity. If funds can be found, the researchers hope to apply any novel properties to modern medicines.

Another of those stories that I find fascinating - As ever it will be interesting to see if anything comes of it. That said germinating a 2,000 year old seed is pretty impressive in itself.