Agriculture
Resurrected seeds to provide real-time evolution info─── 14:05 Mon, 13 Jul 2015
Colorado - Millions of seeds are being placed in cold storage in Colorado in the USA as part of a research project set to span more than a half a century.
According to a report on atlasobscura.com, Project Baseline will be using what is known as the “resurrection approach” to study how plants are evolving in response to climate change.
How it works is that researchers collect seeds from specific plants at specific sites and then place these into cold storage for 10, 20 or even 50 years. The hibernating seeds are then warmed up, planted and grown alongside fresh seeds collected from the same place where the frozen seeds were originally harvested.
The article quotes Steven Franks, a Fordham University associate professor of biological sciences, as saying by growing these "ancestor" plants side by side with their descendants, future scientists will be able to measure changes to genetic make-up and actually see evolution in action.
The team is collecting seeds from 20 different populations of more than 30 species of plants and in the first four years of the project, has already collected about 3-million seeds.
Source: atlasobscura.com
