Cryogenics used to help save critically endangered Queensland trees

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Cryopreservation is being used to help save a critically endangered tree found only in south-east Queensland. There are only 380 specimens of Gossia gonoclada, or angle-stemmed myrtle, left in the wild.

Transcript

00:00It was once the stuff of science fiction. Now cryotechnology is being used to save critically

00:09endangered plants. It's kind of like imagining Han Solo from Star Wars coming out of, you know,

00:15carbon freezing, but doing it for plants. The gossiogonoclata is only found in southeast

00:20Queensland, with 380 trees believed to be left in the wild. A fungal disease known as myrtle rust

00:28is impacting numbers, so too rising temperatures and land clearing. Now scientists at the University

00:35of Queensland have turned to cryopreservation. The idea is to store, to safeguard this species

00:42by storing the healthy regenerable plant tissues so that one day they can be used to grow new plants

00:48in case the species extinct in the wild. They've spent three years perfecting the technique,

00:53which keeps the tissue in liquid nitrogen at negative 196 degrees. The challenging part

01:01for cryopreservation is that you have to develop a protocol for different things every time differently.

01:07The tree is named after former Queensland Premier Wayne Goss and is found mostly here in Logan. The

01:14local council has also jumped on board to do what it can to save the species. And that's including

01:19sort of monitoring the health, the status against threats like myrtle rust, doing habitat mapping.

01:25Researchers have successfully grown new trees out of regenerated frozen tissue. Jing Yin's been

01:32successful in achieving 100% regeneration rate for cryopreservation of Gossia fragrantissima,

01:38which is a related species to Gossia gonoclata. And that's quite unheard of. Giving the tree a future.

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