Centuries-Old Viable Fruit of Sacred Lotus Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn var. China Antique J. Shen-Miller & Louis H. Aung & Jeff Turek & J. William Schopf & Maya Tholandi & Mei Yang & Andrew Czaja Received: 2 October 2012 / Accepted: 21 June 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract During the Sino-Japanese conflict of the 1920s, Japanese botanist Ichiro Ohga was presented single-seeded fruit of Nelumbo nucifera var. China Antique collected by a local farmer from a dry lakebed in Northeast China (then, “Manchuria”). Ohga studied the fruit and published his find- ings. Years later, we tested the germination of Nelumbo fruit from the same locality. The oldest seed sprouted, having a germination time of ~3 days, was radiocarbon dated to be ~1300 years old. These cold- and drought-tolerant seeds exhibited shoot-before-root emergence and a primary green plumule capable of “dim-light” photosynthesis. Such traits and the notable long-term viability of the fruit spurred the interest of Ray Ming, University of Illinois that has now led to the sequencing of the Nelumbo genome. Analyses of this genome may provide insight into the biochemistry of Nelumbo on wax-biosynthesis genes, and application of aging-related thermostable proteins to the extension of seed-life and im- provement of food quality of economic crops. Here, we review the history of these long-lived Nelumbo fruit, and their occur- rence, discovery, collection, propagation, and methods of seedling care. The robust impermeable wax- and suberin- covered pericarp is a major factor contributing to their remark- able longevity. New findings are presented on the modern and 459- and 464-year-old pericarp anatomy, impermeability to water, and whole fruit and pericarp mechanical properties, and comparison of the mode of fruit weight-gain during imbibition and germination time relative to fruit maturity. Keywords Fruit-longevity . Germination-and-seed-maturity . Pericarp anatomy and properties . Green-embryo-axis . Shoot-before-root-emergence Abbreviations AMS Accelerator mass-spectrometry BP Before Present IAA Indole-3-acetic acid, auxin WWII World War Two Symbols and Units Gb Gigabase GPa GigaPascal Communicated by Robert Paull J. Shen-Miller for manuscript preparation, field trips, overall experimen- tation and coordination; L.H. Aung and J. Turek for mechanical proper- ties of Nelumbo fruit and pericarp; J.W. Schopf for Xipaozi field work, fruit cataloguing and figure photoshop; M. Tholandi and A. Czaja for pericarp anatomy; M. Yang for cultivation of Nelumbo fruit. J. Shen-Miller (*) IGPP Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, Department of Ecology and Evolution Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, Geology Building, Room 5676, 595 Charles E. Young Drive East, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567, USA e-mail: shenmiller@lifesci.ucla.edu L. H. Aung USDA, ARS, Postharvest Quality and Genetics Research Unit, 9611 Riverbend Avenue, Parlier, CA 93648, USA J. Turek Hysitron Incorporated, 9625 West 76th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55344, USA J. W. Schopf Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences, University California, Los Angeles, 595 Charles E. Young Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567, USA M. Tholandi Jhiego Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA M. Yang Key Laboratory of Plant Germplasm Enchancement and Specialty Agriculture, Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430074, People’ s Republic of China A. Czaja Department of Geology, University of Cincinnati, 506 Geology Physics Building, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Tropical Plant Biol. DOI 10.1007/s12042-013-9125-1