{"id":39,"date":"2026-11-07T05:08:05","date_gmt":"2026-11-07T05:08:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/?p=39"},"modified":"2026-11-07T05:08:05","modified_gmt":"2026-11-07T05:08:05","slug":"to-safeguard-threatened-plants-scientists-must-master-the-tricky-art-of-seed-banking-philsugar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/?p=39","title":{"rendered":"To Safeguard Threatened Plants, Scientists Must Master the Tricky Art of Seed Banking | PhilSugar"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nMay 2, 2025
\nTo Safeguard Threatened Plants, Scientists Must Master the Tricky Art of Seed Banking
\nResearchers are working to unravel the hidden biology of often-persnickety seeds as they age, sleep and awaken
\nScientists are working to unravel the best ways to save many types of seeds.
\nSeed photos sugar dating photo privacy<\/a> courtesy of M. Cubre, Copyright BO Berlin
\nTo Safeguard Threatened Plants, Scientists Must Master the Tricky Art of Seed Banking
\nResearchers are working to unravel the hidden biology of often-persnickety seeds as they age, sleep and awaken
\nKatarina Zimmer,
\nKnowable Magazine
\nMay 2, 2025
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\nScientists are working to unravel the best ways to save many types of seeds.
\nSeed photos courtesy of M. Cubre, Copyright BO Berlin
\nOn a frosty day in early January, as Berlin\u2019s trees and shrubs lie in deep dormancy, it\u2019s hard to imagine it being much colder. But then I reach the Dahlem Seed Bank at the German city\u2019s botanical gardens, and botanist
\nElke Zippel
\nguides me to a freezing chamber in the cellar, at a cool minus 11.2 degrees Fahrenheit, and the warmth rushes out of my body.
\nAround us are shelves of glass jars, jam-packed with vials of seeds. \u201cThere are millions of seeds,\u201d says Zippel: minuscule black ones, rice-like ones and little brown pebble-like ones. The temperatures here have put them in a deep slumber intended to preserve them for the ages.
\nThat\u2019s for a good reason. The bank\u2019s 12,000-plus collections include seeds of sugar dating profile setup<\/a> many rare or threatened European species\u2014from the mountain arnica, a furry-leaved herb with healing properties that has lost much of its lowland habitat to intensive agriculture, to
\nGentianella uliginosa
\n, a swamp-dwelling, purple-petaled flower that has become one of the continent\u2019s rarest plants. All over the world, wild plants like these\u2014vital members of ecosystems and unique products of eons of evolution\u2014are losing ground.
\nOver the past 250 years, around 570 species have gone extinct
\nbecause of habitat destruction,
\ninvasive species
\nand other threats.
\nBotanists at the Dahlem Seed Bank in Berlin are running germination tests with seeds of the threatened swamp-dwelling plant
\nGentianella uliginosa
\n, which has purple flowers (top panel). The goal is to see whether germination success can be improved in the presence of certain fungi (bottom panel).
\nUllabrittoland \/ iNaturalist (top), Katarina Zimmer (bottom)
\nSeeds offer a cost-effective way of preserving plants for future generations\u2014hence intense efforts to bank the seeds of agricultural crops. There\u2019s much less money available to preserve seeds of threatened and rare plants, but the Dahlem facility, like many seed banks around the world, is striving to do so, providing a last line of defense against extinctions and a reservoir of diversity to support dwindling populations.
\nBut preserving seeds for future use is no simple task. Though seeds are living, breathing beings, many enter a deep metabolic slumber called dormancy, defiantly resisting germination until the time is right for them to sprout. It can be hard to wake them up. And while some seeds can long outlive people in this dozing state, many grow old and expire, even under ideal storage conditions.
\nLittle by little, research is revealing what keeps seeds in deep sleep, how they age and die, and how to revive them when their time has come.
\n\u201cEach species is its own little series of mysteries,\u201d says botanist Wesley Knapp, the CEO of the California-based
\nCenter for Plant Conservation
\n. \u201cThis is really frontline science, in many sugar dating ID verification<\/a> ways, and we\u2019re trying to figure out what these very rare plants may need.\u201d
\nThe life and death of a seed
\nSeeds are essentially plant embryos, arising when pollen lands on a flower and fertilizes an egg cell; the embryos are often encased by energy-supplying tissues, a shell and sometimes fleshy fruit. To the amateur gardener, it may seem surprising that many are so little understood. After all, most cultivated and domesticated plant species\u2014think
\npetunias
\nor
\ntomatoes
\n\u2014have been bred to sprout quickly with soil, light and water. As long as the seeds are plonked in the ground before their expiration date, their metabolism swings into action, cells divide, a root shoots downward, and a plant begins to grow.
\nBut wild plants are meant to travel through time. For many of them, when their seeds dry out and fall dormant, their metabolism grinds to a halt, and they resist germination for months, years or even decades. Plants do this as a bet-hedging strategy to stop their offspring from sprouting right away, in case conditions are bad for young seedlings\u2014like in the middle of a dry summer, during a protracted drought or when there\u2019s too much competing vegetation.
\nScientists have learned that mother plants can take stock of environmental conditions and relay signals to developing seeds to prolong or shorten this dormancy. For example, when thale cress, a plant much studied in labs, experiences unusually chilly temperatures, it loads its fruit tissues with certain proteins; these proteins
\ntweak the activity of genes in developing seeds so they stay dormant longer
\n.
\nNo seed lives forever. Although scientists report to have revived a
\n2,000-year-old No. 1 sugar dating site Philippines<\/a> date palm seed from an archaeological site
\nin the Middle East, such cases are the exception. Knapp has struggled to revive century-old seeds from plants that are now extinct. And in an experiment that has been tracking seeds of 91 California native plant species since 1947, many seeds lost the ability to sprout in the first several decades, says
\nChristina Walters
\n, a seed biologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who is curating the study.
\nBut exactly why and how seeds age and die is something that scientists are still trying to understand. When seeds dry out\u2014which most dormant seeds do\u2014the cells inside transition from a fluid state to a solid, glassy state that protects them from degradation. Still, Walters suspects that seeds do accrue tiny physical and chemical changes over time; molecules within their cells undergo tiny rearrangements and become less able to power vital processes like energy production and protein-making.
\nThe damage ultimately reaches a point of no return, says Walters, who is trying to identify the precise tipping point. \u201cThe seed\u2014it\u2019s alive, it\u2019s alive, it\u2019s alive, and then it dies,\u201d she says.
\nExtending seed lives
\nFortunately for threatened plants, there are ways of extending seed lives. At the Dahlem Seed Bank, Zippel takes me through a series of rooms for preparing seeds for freezing: one for drying them, another for cleaning them of fruit material and dust. Drying the seeds coaxes them into the desired glassy state, and freezing them further winds down molecular movement. This can add years to seeds\u2019 lives, from a few decades to hundreds of years, Zippel says.
\nIn the drying room at the Dahlem Seed Bank in Berlin, botanist Elke Zippel handles plants that were collected to preserve dried plant specimens as well as their seeds.
\nKatarina Zimmer
\nBut
\nnot all seeds can be preserved this way
\n\u2014it works for \u201corthodox\u201d seeds that can dry, which is key to safely freezing them. \u201cRecalcitrant\u201d seeds like acorns and chestnuts contain a lot of water and don\u2019t tolerate drying. Freezing these seeds under normal conditions causes the water inside them to expand, crushing and killing the cells.
\nThis is where cryopreservation comes in, explains seed- and cryobiologist
\nManuela Nagel
\nof the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, co-author of an article on cryopreservation in the 2024
\nAnnual Review of Plant Biology
\n. The most common method involves very rapidly freezing plant tissue to ultra-low temperatures\u2014usually by placing it in liquid nitrogen below minus 238 degrees Fahrenheit\u2014so ice crystals don\u2019t have time to form. But each species seems to need its own cryopreservation protocol. \u201cFinding out what the plant tolerates can be challenging and take years,\u201d Nagel says.
\nIn Sussex, England, at the Millennium Seed Bank of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for instance, seed biologist
\nLouise Colville
\nis working to cryopreserve acorns of British oak species. It\u2019s part of Kew\u2019s effort to establish a cryobank for plants that can\u2019t be preserved in traditional seed banks. Since largest sugar daddy site Philippines<\/a> even cryopreservation requires tissues to have as little water content as possible, she and her colleagues usually excise the oak embryos inside acorns, partially dry them and rapidly freeze them.
\nBut it has taken much trial and error to get this to work. The embryo tissues brown as soon as they\u2019re exposed to air, and they seem to be extremely sensitive to drying and nitrogen exposure. \u201cEven with a really great protocol, a success rate of 40 percent survival is considered good,\u201d Colville says.
\nColville and her colleagues are also trying to cryopreserve seagrass seeds to help with efforts to restore grassy marine habitats. They hope to preserve pollen, spores, shoot tips and dormant buds as well, from plants that don\u2019t produce seeds. \u201cIt really does open up the possibilities for conserving a much wider range of species,\u201d she says.
\nBut cryopreservation, just like seed banking, doesn\u2019t provide infinite longevity. And the only way to know when a seed collection has given up the ghost is to do regular germination tests, which are time-consuming and risk depleting precious seed collections when working with rare species.
\nIn a frigid cellar room at the Dahlem Seed Bank, kept at minus 11.2 Fahrenheit, seeds from a large variety of European species are being preserved for the ages. Many of them are from threatened and rare plants.
\nKatarina Zimmer
\nThat\u2019s why Walters is exploring other ways to measure seed viability and predict life expectancy. She has learned, for example, that the small snippets of genetic material called RNA turn to fragments over time\u2014and this could be measured by extracting RNA molecules from seeds and sorting them by size. This serves as a kind of clock that reflects a seed\u2019s age.
\nThe oil molecules in seeds also break apart and create impurities that affect how the oils crystallize when they\u2019re cooled. These changes become apparent when analyzing the amount of energy absorbed by seeds as they\u2019re warmed up past the melting point of their fats, which can be done without destroying the seeds.
\nIf researchers could catch viability declines early enough by such methods, it would make it easier to know when to grow plants from seeds while they can still germinate, and collect
\ntheir
\nseeds for storage, keeping the collection going.
\nStubborn seeds
\nEven if seeds are viable, waking them up can be a challenge in and of itself. In fact, the very definition of dormancy is that seeds
\nwon\u2019t
\nsprout even when given soil, water and light. \u201cIf a seed doesn\u2019t want to germinate because it\u2019s not the right time,\u201d Zippel says, \u201cit will not germinate.\u201d
\nSome seeds, like those of many plants short term sugar arrangement<\/a> in the celery and carrot family, need time for their embryos to
\nfully mature after leaving the mother plant
\n, sprouting only weeks or months later. Beans often have a very tough seed coat that prevents water from entering, and verified sugar daddy sa Philippines<\/a> only when this is broken\u2014by something such as
\nwildfire
\nheat, the acid of a bird\u2019s stomach, a scalpel or sandpaper\u2014can water enter and the seed awaken.
\nBut the most common form of seed dormancy is also the toughest to break. Seeds in such states take up water, which revs up their metabolism. But then the metabolism quickly winds back down, and they go to back to sleep, explains seed physiologist
\nDennis Brandt
\nof the University of M\u00fcnster in Germany. Researchers have worked out that such seeds resist germination by
\nmaintaining a certain balance of two plant hormones
\n\u2014abscisic acid and gibberellin\u2014inside the seed.
\nThere\u2019s a tension between these two hormones. Abscisic acid kick-starts a cascade of biochemical reactions that repress cell division and growth, while gibberellin has the opposite effect. Until the balance tips in favor of gibberellin, the seed will continue to snooze.
\nIn some seeds, the switch from dormancy to germination is controlled by a balance between two classes of plant hormones: abscisic acid, which maintains dormancy by repressing cell division, and sugar dating fake photos<\/a> gibberellins, which trigger germination by fueling growth. Seeds have evolved elaborate mechanisms to tip the balance in favor of gibberellins in response to certain triggers such as light or temperature changes. Only then can seeds start to grow.
\nAdapted from G. N\u00e9e et al. \/
\nCurrent Opinion in Plant Biology
\n2017 \/ Knowable Magazine
\nAnd that\u2019s just part of the puzzle. More recently, scientists have realized that a protein called \u201cDelay of Germination 1\u201d\u2014or DOG1\u2014also
\nplays an important role in prolonging dormancy
\n. It does so by acting on other proteins and genes, with the details still to be figured out. Many seeds require both abscisic acid and DOG1 to maintain dormancy, Brandt says.
\nWhat exactly are the seeds waiting for? The answer\u2014ideal conditions for germination\u2014has led to the evolution of elegant triggers. Some seeds have light-detecting molecules called phytochromes under their seed coats that
\nprompt gibberellin production in the presence of red light
\n\u2014the only wavelengths that trickle through a forest canopy, signaling a shady, protected spot to sprout. Other seeds need darkness, to ensure germination in deep soil layers. And some need a period of cold\u2014signaling the end of winter and the imminent arrival of spring. That cold, in some plants, triggers changes in the amounts of DOG1 and the destruction of abscisic acid, so that a seed\u2019s metabolism fully springs into action.
\nInterestingly, different populations of the same species can have
\nstronger or weaker dormancies
\nthat dovetail with their needs in different environments, Brandt says. And differences can also occur within the offspring of a single plant, ensuring that seeds don\u2019t all germinate at the same time. This could be beneficial when there\u2019s a sudden spell of spring warmth followed by a cold wave, he adds, \u201cpossibly killing the early-germinating seedlings but likely not the ones which did not germinate yet.\u201d
\nAnd there\u2019s much more to learn: Scientists have focused mostly on well-studied laboratory models like thale cress and are only scratching the surface of dormancy-breaking processes in many species, Brandt says, especially the rare and exotic ones that are most in need of conserving.
\nBreaking dormancy
\nWhile some species have simple and obvious germination triggers, other species have evolved unique\u2014and sometimes very elaborate\u2014solutions.
\n\u201cA lot of things in the lily family need a warm and wet stratification before cold and wet, and then when you shift them back to a warm situation, they\u2019ll finally germinate,\u201d says plant ecologist
\nMichael Kunz
\nof the North Carolina Botanical Garden.
\nThe
\nglobe bladderpod, a yellow-flowered mustard
\nlosing its habitat to roads and agriculture, has germination triggers that vary greatly across populations and even within the same mother plants. At the Missouri Botanical Garden, ecologist
\nMatthew Albrecht
\nhas found that seeds respond variably to different combinations of light, temperature and increased levels of nitrates around them\u2014signaling that vegetation around the seed has decayed, providing nutrients and space for young seedlings.
\n\u201cThese species that have this bet-hedging seed dormancy strategy\u2014those are some of the trickiest species to deal with,\u201d Albrecht says.
\nThe seeds of the globe bladderpod, a plant in the mustard family, can have remarkably different germination triggers. Seeds from different populations, or even from the same mother plant, respond to different combinations of light, temperature and chemical changes in the soil. Working out how to germinate these seeds may help to preserve the species, which is losing its habitat to road developments and agricultural expansion.
\nMatthew Albrecht
\nAnd there are seeds, such as from wild beet and certain plants in the umbel family, that some scientists say they can\u2019t get to sprout no matter what they do. Researchers estimate they only know surely how to propagate less than 10 percent of the 1,200 rare species stored in the banks of the California Plant Rescue, a cross-organization effort that collects and preserves seeds from around the state. \u201cIf all we had to do was collect the seeds, put them in storage and then never deal with them again, that is one thing,\u201d says
\nNaomi Fraga
\n, who directs conservation programs at the California Botanic Garden, one of the rescue\u2019s member organizations. But, she adds, \u201cif we don\u2019t know how to grow them, then what is the point?\u201d
\nSome triggers have taken decades to work out. In the mid-1990s, restoration ecologist and botanist
\nKingsley Dixon
\nof the University of Western Australia was struggling to grow seedlings of dozens of species needed for a mining site restoration project. Because those plants evolved to sprout after bushfires\u2014when flames have cleared out competitors and produced nutrient-rich soils\u2014Dixon wondered if exposing them to heat would break their dormancy. But this had little effect.
\nAfter getting a clue from a conference presentation by South African researchers, he finally realized the trigger might be smoke. And sure enough, when he blew smoke from burning leaves into a germination tent or poured smoke-infused water over the soil, little sprouts emerged from seeds of the purple-petaled fringed lily.
\nOver a decade later, Dixon\u2019s team finally identified, among 4,000 chemical compounds, the
\nspecific molecules in smoke that trigger germination
\nin hundreds of Australian species and many from elsewhere. The team named them karrikins after a word for fire used by the Aboriginal Noongar people. The chemicals are probably produced at the steam-producing front of a fire and seep with the water through the soil into the seeds, which \u201cfind it irresistible,\u201d Dixon says. Some research suggests that
\nkarrikins spur gibberellin production
\n, kick-starting growth.
\nBack in 1998, Dixon revived a species feared to be extinct: the Corrigin grevillea. The plant had last been spotted decades earlier, growing by a highway in the town of Corrigin in Western Australia\u2019s wheat belt, where most land has been cleared for agriculture. Scientists marked the spot and crossed their fingers that dormant seeds still lay in the soil. When Dixon and his colleagues arrived, they erected tents around the area and pumped in smoke\u2014and, finally, saw seedlings emerging. \u201cIt was extraordinary,\u201d Dixon recalls.
\nEver since, Australian botanists have been wielding smoke to wake up dormant seeds. Within the past three years, they\u2019ve revived a near-extinct cousin of the Corrigin grevillea, the Foote\u2019s grevillea, and a small,
\nthreatened herb known as
\nSowerbaea multicaulis
\n.
\nThe Australian plant
\nGrevillea scapigera
\n, known as the Corrigin grevillea (bottom panel) was once thought to be extinct. But at the spot where it was last seen, scientists were able to reawaken seeds that lay dormant in the soil by exposing them to smoke, which they blasted into tents erected around the site (top panel).
\nKingsley Dixon (top), Istock.com \/ Karenhblack (bottom)
\nThere are still mystery plants in the Australian desert and wildflower lands, including some native blueberries that Dixon has been trying to germinate since 1982; he suspects they may require a very particular sequence of environmental cues.
\nFrom light to smoke, there\u2019s a great bet-hedging benefit to ecosystems in having such a diversity of dormancy-breaking processes across species and even within them, Dixon says. \u201cIt\u2019s like the Las Vegas of ecology: They\u2019re playing every table in the room.\u201d
\nFrom seed to ecosystem
\nTricky though it is, germinating young seedlings is just the first step in rebuilding self-sustaining wild plant populations, from
\nidentifying fungi they need to grow with
\nto protecting them against challenges like active sugar dating sites Philippines<\/a> drought. But there are success stories.
\nAt a military base in North Carolina, Kunz and his colleagues have used preserved seeds to restore populations of the
\nGeorgia false indigo
\n, the
\nsandhills milkvetch
\nand the
\nsandhills lily
\n.
\nIn several natural areas managed by Tennessee government agencies, Albrecht\u2019s team has made progress in restoring a purple-flowered legume known as Pyne\u2019s ground plum, much of whose original habitat has been covered by Nashville developments.
\nAnd on Germany\u2019s Baltic Sea coast, Zippel\u2019s colleagues successfully restored populations of the mountain arnica. \u201cNow the population is growing by itself,\u201d she says.
\nThese are small victories, but they matter in a world where threats to plants continue to mount. As Zippel stashes seeds away in her freezing basement, as biologists further unlock the secrets of dormancy, and as botanists work to revive and raise young seedlings for return to the wild, these scientists hope they can give all threatened plants an essential lifeline.
\nKnowable Magazine
\nis an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.
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