Researchers at Michigan State University are working to recreate a historic variety of rye seeds that were recently rescued from the bottom of Lake Huron.
The grain, called the Bentley rye, was named after the shipwrecked schooner it was found in. The boat and the seeds have been underwater since 1878.
That was until September, when a group led by the owner of two Michigan distillery companies hatched a plan to recover and grow the seeds.
Chad Munger is the founder and CEO of Mammoth Distilling and Consolidated Rye and Whiskey. Munger, an MSU alum, had previously been involved with efforts to resurrect another variety of rye, the Rosen rye.
The Rosen rye project saw Munger partner with MSU plant geneticist Eric Olson. That project was ultimately successful.
Munger and Olson teamed up once again, this time with the goal of growing the recovered Bentley rye seeds.
Once seeds were recovered from the schooner by a dive team, Munger had to rush them to Olson's lab.
But given the age of the Bentley seeds and the fact that the seeds had been underwater for about 145 years, it proved to be far too difficult to get the seeds to germinate.
Though not all was lost, because they were still able to collect valuable data from the seeds DNA, making the agricultural feat of reverse engineering the seeds possible, Olson said.
“We were able to recover the genome, and we are in the process right now of sequencing all seven chromosomes of that rye variety, so we will know the exact nucleotide sequence, As, Ts, Cs and Gs from one end of each chromosome to the other," he said.
Olson said they’re sequencing the genome from the seeds along with a database of 300 other rye varieties from the USDA's gene bank.
“We just have to identify them and then we can reassemble the genome of the shipwrecked rye variety," he said. "We’ll be able to recreate it using modern genome sequencing and conventional plant breeding techniques.”
Olson said recreating the Bentley rye will offer a glimpse into what crop varieties looked like in the late 1800s.
"This was well before modern plant breeding, and the maintenance of germplasm and seed banks," Olson said.
He adds it could also jump start a rye improvement program.
"Rye, itself, has a lot of value in terms of its resilience, right? It's resilient to high temperature stresses. It's resilient to drought. It's resilient to cold. I mean, this is why it's such a remarkable cover crop," he said.
Oslon said rye could also become more important as the earth sees more climate extremes.
