Moss that has been frozen under glaciers for 400 years has been revived. The plants called "bryophytes" didn't require any scientific techniques to grow, reported i09.com.
Bryophytes are non-vascular plants, examples include mosses, hornworts, and liverworts. Theses plants don't flower or produce seeds, but rather reproduce through spores.
Bryophytes also have the ability for clonal growth; this means that they can produce a new plant from vegetative material that has fallen from the original specimen.
The plants have been frozen since the "little ice age" that occurred between the 16th and 19th centuries. During this time glaciers began to appear over the Northern Hemisphere.
These glaciers have been slowly retreating over the past century, but they have been melting at an accelerated rate since 2004.
As the ice retreats more plants from the era are being revealed. "It's kind of like a blanket being pulled back, allowing you to see what the Little Ice Age was like," said Catherine La Farge, a bryophyte botanist at the University of Alberta.
La Farge and a some colleuges took a trip to Sverdrup Pass, a mountain pass in central Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada where the plants where found.
"We walked up to the glacier and looked at the populations of bryophytes," La Farge told io9. "They looked blackened, but they were blackened with a green tint." The plants that had been frozen in ice for hundreds of years were beginning to regenerate themselves.
The team confirmed that the plants were 400 years old through radio carbon dating. When they looked at the plants under a microscope they noticed that they had new lateral branch development or stem regeneration.
In an effort to regrow the plants in a laboratory setting the team ground up tissue from the plant's stems and leaves and simply potted and watered them.
Through this technique the team was able to grow 11 cultures from seven different types of specimens.
Watch them grow:
These are not the oldest plants the be revived, but they are the only frozen plants to be revived without complex scientific interference.
" The plants regenerative powers are partly due to their cells' ability to dedifferentiate (lose their specialized function) and return to a stem-cell-like state, allowing them to then become any type of plant cell," La Farge said.
La Farge hopes that this breakthrough will get other scientists to pay attention to bryophytes. She believes that by further studying the mossy plants we can get a better understanding of basic life systems and may even gain insight into the possibility of promoting biological development on Mars.
Moss has already been taken into space to see how it grows in zero gravity.
"Maybe astronauts would want to take bryophytes to other planets to see if they would grow and how they could modify extraterrestrial landscapes," La Farge said.
