Seed Sprouts Longevity Hopes : Botany: Germination of centuries-old lotus may unlock secrets of slowing the aging process, UCLA researchers say.

After sleeping for 12 centuries at the bottom of a Chinese lake, a lotus seed sprouted under the care of a UCLA botanist, promising insight into how to slow the aging process.

The seed is thought to be the oldest known to germinate, scientists reported Monday. Should researchers discover the secrets of the lotus--a sacred plant that in Buddhism symbolizes purity and longevity--the benefits could span from hardier crop seeds to a skin cream that thwarts wrinkles.

“Life can be much longer than we ever expected,” said UCLA plant physiologist Jane Shen-Miller, lead author of the research article that appears in the November issue of the American Journal of Botany. “We certainly have much to learn about how [lotus seeds] can survive 1,000 years of rest.”

Shen-Miller acquired seven of the lotus seeds, which look like dark brown peanut-size footballs, while visiting the Beijing Institute of Botany in 1982. Chinese botanists had unearthed the seeds several decades earlier from a dry lake bed in northeast China, near the border with Korea.

The next, Shen-Miller soaked four of the seeds in water after filing off part of their hard outer husks to allow moisture to reach the partly dried-out centers. Each day, she peered at them.

“Then on the fourth day, the lips started to open, and I saw a little green thing,” Shen-Miller said Monday. “It was overwhelming.”

According to one of Shen-Miller’s collaborators, UCLA biochemist Steven Clarke, “It’s almost as if you took a woman who’s one or two months pregnant, took the fetus, wrapped it up in a hard shell, and then threw it out into the environment for one year, 10 years, 50 years.”

The seeds’ revival was as short as their hibernation was long, however. “The moment I saw they have sprouted, I burned them,” Shen-Miller said. Carbon dating the seedling required drying them in a 100-degree oven, killing them.

One seed turned out to be 1,288 years old by the dating method. Even factoring in the imprecision of carbon dating--give or take nearly 300 years--the seed had settled to the lake bottom centuries before Marco Polo reached China.

A second seedling grew from a 684-year-old seed, while a rain storm destroyed the third before it could be dated. The fourth seed, which failed to revive, was tested to be 755 years old.

While the sprouting seeds were thought to be important, and Shen-Miller presented the results at a scientific meeting at the time, the research was not published until now. “I was busy doing other things,” she said Monday.

She returned to the remaining three seeds last year when a new dating technique allowed her to determine their ages from a sliver of the outer coating, leaving the rest undamaged. Their ages: 95, 332 and 416 years old.

The 416-year-old one didn’t grow. The next-oldest seed sprouted and lived nine months in Shen-Miller’s courtyard but because of her gardening inexperience, didn’t survive to flower a second year, she said.

She gave the third and youngest seed to Clarke, a specialist on aging. His research has focused on an enzyme called MT--short for L-isoapartyl methyltransferase--which repairs kinks that periodically appear in strands of proteins. MT is present in most creatures, from bacteria to people to plants.

Not surprisingly, Clarke found the enzyme in the lotus seed as well. “If this enzyme was not there, then you’d have to say ‘There’s something wrong with the story,’ ” Clarke said. More surprisingly, the enzyme appeared as robust as that found in modern-day seeds, he said.

The seed’s proteins were remarkably free of the kinks, considering their age. “It’s the first living system where we’ve seen--over a long period of time--no accumulation of this kind of damage,” said Mary Beth Mudgett, another researcher.

According to Clarke, MT is probably one of a class of enzymes that repair damaged proteins. In the future, it may be possible through genetic engineering to introduce the lotus’ long-lived qualities into other crop seeds, Clarke said.

For humans, Clarke has patented the idea of producing a skin cream with MT. Though no tests have yet been done, such a cream could slow the wrinkles of old age, he said.

“These seeds are extremely well-preserved,” Clarke said. Researchers hope “to learn the secrets of the lotus and see if any of those tricks might be applicable to us.”