Oldest regenerated plant

In 2012, it was reported that a team from the Russian Academy of Sciences had grown new plants from the frozen fruit of 32,000-year-old Silene stenophylla narrow-leaf campion flowers. A cache of the immature fruit (also containing seeds) was discovered in fossilized squirrel burrows on the banks of the Kolyma River in north-eastern Siberia, dating to the Late Pleistocene era (i.e. the last ice age). The cache was buried some 38 m (124 ft) below the permafrost and although it was damaged, genetic material was successfully extracted. The team placed the fruit tissue into a rich nutrient mix. Seedlings grew, which were then transplanted into soil, giving rise to new plants. These generated lace white flowers and, in turn, produced new seeds. The results of the study were published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 21 February 2012.

The species Silene stenophylla still exists on the Siberian tundra to this day, however interestingly the scientists noted that some key differences between the plant grown from the historical material including finer petals and variation in the gender of the flowers (e.g., all of the flowers on modern examples are bisexual but on the older specimen, all of the early flowers were female with a smaller number of bisexual blooms arriving later.

In 2020, scientists in Austria investigated the genome of the plant to try to understand how the seeds were able to remain viable for so long while frozen.