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A comment on Dead Sea dates grown from 2000-year-old seeds.

Re:Dead Sea dates grown from 2000-year-old seeds by echelon on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @01:37PM (#22301187)
The half life of DNA is reported to be 521 years in bone [0]. I'm shocked that there hasn't been a lot of accumulated deleterious mutation or damage here.

I know plants typically have a high ploidity (multiple chromosome copies - humans only have a factor of 2, whereas bananas have 4 or higher [1]). Is that how this works?

[0] https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.1...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy#

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Re:Dead Sea dates grown from 2000-year-old seeds by jessriedel on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @02:07PM (#22301527)
Maybe, although this wasn't bone, and I think other conditions can lead to better preservation. They have been able to extract useful info from samples that are ~1M years old.
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