Ancient clone saw out the last ice age

[Adsos Letter]

Source: NewScientist
Jessica Hamzelou

Clones of an ancient bush have been discovered in California by botanists who reckon the original plant first grew at the height of the last ice age, 13,000 years ago.

Around 10 years ago, Mitch Provance of the University of California, Riverside, was carrying out a routine plant survey in the Jurupa mountains in southern California when he came across a patch of Palmer's oak bushes. The thicket interested Provance because not only was it miles away from its normal home – higher up in the mountains – but because each bush looked startlingly similar. Provance suspected the bushes might all be clones of each other.

Provance and his colleagues analysed proteins in the bushes' leaves and found that leaves from different bushes had all the same forms of proteins. "The chance that the bushes were so similar randomly, or even as siblings, is minuscule," says Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, who led the study.

Evidence that the plants are clones of an ice-age original comes from the high rate of "acorn abortion". "The trees are aborting their acorns before they can mature – they're basically sterile," says Ross-Ibarra. He suggests that the bushes are being cloned from sprouts of other bushes.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18324-ancient-clone-saw-out-the-last-ice-age.html
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[xchrom]

1. Fascinating on a number of levels --

Not the least because I am also a bonsai
enthusiast.