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Ginkgo longevity secret

22.01.2020

Trees live for a long time, but among them there are absolutely amazing centenarians. For example, ginkgo biloba, or Ginkgo biloba, can live for more than 3000 years - here it is not far from immortality. Obviously, ginkgo has some mechanisms that help resist aging, and researchers from Beijing Forestry University, Yangzhou University and other scientific centers in China and the United States managed to partially decipher these mechanisms.

Li Wang and his colleagues studied the structure of 34 ginkgoes ranging in age from 3 to 667 years; wood samples were taken from living and healthy trees. Tree growth rings show the rate at which a tree has grown from year to year, and trees usually slow down over time. However, even after hundreds of years, ginkgo continued to grow in the same way as they grew, and sometimes even faster than before. And neither the size of the leaves, nor the intensity of photosynthesis reactions, nor the quality of the seeds changed with age.

The researchers compared the activity of genes in ginkgo leaves and cambium - this is the name of a special tissue in the stems and roots, due to which conductive tissues grow in thickness, vascular bundles, along which water and nutrients move from the roots to the top of the plant and back. As expected, the "aging" genes were especially active in aging and dying leaves. But in cambial cells, such "age" genes, which are activated in the later years of life, did not particularly manifest themselves in old trees - that is, they worked the same way in both old and young trees. In other words, ginkgo aged only by leaves, which, obviously, could always be replaced with new ones.

However, some age-related changes did occur with ginkgo. Older trees had lower levels of heteroauxin (a growth hormone) and increased levels of abscisic acid (a hormone that inhibits growth). Ginkgoes that were over 200 years old also had less active genes responsible for cell division and cell differentiation. That is, although the cambium cells remained young in old trees, they were not allowed to divide as actively as in young trees.

At the same time, protection against pathogens did not weaken in ginkgo over time - both young and old trees equally worked those genes that are responsible for the synthesis of antimicrobial flavonoids and for resistance to various parasites. It turns out that the only thing in which ginkgo aging manifests itself is a gradual inhibition of growth and renewal of conductive tissues. It can be assumed that in the end growth will stop altogether, and the tree will still die, since it is still necessary to update the conducting system. But given that the age of some ginkgo is several thousand years, the margin of growth inhibition, if I may say so, is quite large.

Ginkgo is called a living fossil in the sense that, having arisen a very long time ago, back in the Permian period, it managed to survive to this day. Perhaps this way of longevity is unique to him, but it is also possible that other long-lived trees, like the famous redwoods, use the ginkgo recipe - to inhibit growth in thickness, keeping the cambium and immune system young.

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