Despite Debate, Even the World's Oldest Trees are Not Immortal
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Despite debate, even the world's oldest trees are not immortal:
The oldest trees on Earth have stood for nearly five millennia, and researchers have long wondered to what extent these ancient organisms undergo senescence, physically deteriorating as they age. A recent paper studying ginkgoes, one of the world's longest-lived trees, even found that they may be able to "escape senescence at the whole-plant level," raising questions about the apparent lack of aging in centuries-old trees. However, in a Forum publishing July 27 in the journal Trends in Plant Science, plant biologist Sergi Munne-Bosch argues that although signs of senescence in long-lived trees may be almost imperceptible to people, this does not mean that they're immortal.
[...] Despite trees' well-evolved methods of prolonging the aging process, research has shown that they still undergo physiological stress associated with senescence. "They have limits," says Munne-Bosch. "There are physical and mechanical constraints that limit their ability to live indefinitely."
However, due to the difficulty of conducting research on trees with such long lifespans, little is known about what the process of senescence looks like. Simply finding enough millennial trees to study can be challenging. "When a species of tree can live for five millennia, it's very difficult to find even two trees that are between two and five millennia," says Munne-Bosch. For these long-lived trees, dying of senescence is a possibility, but the probability of dying from other causes is significantly higher. "They don't have to worry about senescence because they have other things that worry them more," he says.
Journal Reference:
Li Wang, Jiawen Cui, Biao Jin, et al. Multifeature analyses of vascular cambial cells reveal longevity mechanisms in old Ginkgo biloba trees [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1916548117)
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