00:00It was once the stuff of science fiction.
00:05Now cryotechnology is being used to save critically endangered plants.
00:10It's kind of like imagining Han Solo from Star Wars coming out of, you know, carbon freezing, but doing it for plants.
00:17The Gossier Gonoclata is only found in southeast Queensland, with 380 trees believed to be left in the wild.
00:25A fungal disease known as myrtle rust is impacting numbers, so too rising temperatures and land clearing.
00:33Now scientists at the University of Queensland have turned to cryopreservation.
00:38The idea is to store, to safeguard this species by storing the healthy regenerable plant tissues,
00:45so that one day they can be used to grow new plants in case the species extinct in the wild.
00:51They've spent three years perfecting the technique, which keeps the tissue in liquid nitrogen at negative 196 degrees.
00:59The challenging part for 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.
01:13The local council has also jumped on board to do what it can to save the species.
01:18And that's including sort 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.
01:30Jing Yin's been successful in achieving 100% regeneration rate for cryopreservation of Gossier fragrantissima,
01:38which is a related species to Gossier gonoclata, and that's quite unheard of.
01:42Giving the tree a future.
01:49...
01:51...
01:52...
01:53...
01:55...
01:57...
01:59...
02:01...
02:02...
Comments