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janrinok [soylentnews.org] writes:

Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey [antarctica.ac.uk] and Reading University [reading.ac.uk] have demonstrated [antarctica.ac.uk] that moss can come back to life and continue to grow after being frozen for 1,500 years.

This is the first study to show long-term survival in plants; hitherto, only bacteria have show similar timescales. The article continues:

Co-author Professor Peter Convey from the British Antarctic Survey explained 'What mosses do in the ecosystem is far more important than we would generally realise when we look at a moss on a wall here for instance. Understanding what controls their growth and distribution, particularly in a fast-changing part of the world such as the Antarctic Peninsula region, is therefore of much wider significance.'

The team took cores of moss from deep in a frozen moss bank in the Antarctic. This moss would already have been at least decades old when it was first frozen. They sliced the frozen moss cores very carefully, keeping them free from contamination, and placed them in an incubator at a normal growth temperature and light level. After only a few weeks, the moss began to grow. Using carbon dating, the team identified the moss to be at least 1,530 years of age, and possibly even older, at the depth where the new growth was seen. Regeneration also occurred in a liverwort embedded in organic material at the base of the core.

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