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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

This statement is so dubious I don't know what to make of the rest of the article:

> And now, a team of scientists has sequenced one of the seed’s DNA—the oldest-yet genetic code recovered from a plant. The genome reveals the seeds belonged to a 6,000-year-old wild watermelon

Meanwhile, in 2003 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sediment-cores-yi... said

> Researchers have retrieved from sediment cores plant DNA that is nearly 400,000 years old--the oldest such specimen ever recovered.

and in 2012 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/120221-ol... said

> 32,000-Year-Old Plant Brought Back to Life—Oldest Yet

I'm sure there are other examples too.

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These statements are all consistent.

- oldest plant DNA to be sequenced

- oldest plant DNA to be recovered (though I'm not exactly sure how "recovered" is defined here)

- oldest plant to be brought back to life

Consistent but disingenuous.

If you can bring it to life, you can sequence its DNA. Maybe they didn't, but that seems a bit strange. Same with recovering DNA molecules but not sequencing them.

These were found with just a quick search, and I'm sure there are more. The oldest animal DNA sequenced is far older than 6,000 years, so I'm doubting the article's claim.

I always wonder how they look this stuff up when they're writing the research article. There's no database for the 'oldest plant to be sequenced' and whatnot that you can just look up. If you look it up on Google, who's to say your source is up to date?

yeah, I'm sure there's plenty such claims that can be proven wrong. Unless it's already a well-known fact in the field.

Like in archeology, the "oldest ... to be ..." is often very well known because it has direct consequences for their methodologies and paradigms

Either way, I don't see why you would write off a whole bit of research for something that was probably just meant to be a side-comment to bring in some additional context for people outside the field

I would suspect the statements are provided by the scientists. They are likely the best people to make such claims too (though that doesn't necessarily convey high accuracy)

There’s a difference between sequencing the genome of DNA, which the article talks about, and retrieving DNA strands intact. The latter is akin to getting the book, the former is akin to reading it. This is likely to account for the discrepancy.

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