One of the Free-Ride offspring (which one? who can tell; it was last week) brought home a plant grown from seed as part of a school project.
“We planted the seeds in yogurt containers,” said whichever child it was, “except they didn’t have yogurt in them anymore, just dirt.”
“Well, that’s good,” one of the Free-Ride parental units said (which one? who can tell; see above). “The seeds wouldn’t have germinated in yogurt.”
Of course, that got us thinking …
How would you have to tweak a plant’s genome to get it to produce seeds that would germinate in yogurt?
What kind of selection pressures could possibly result in a plant whose seeds preferentially germinate in yogurt rather than in soil? (Yogurt in the refrigerator versus warm growing active yogurt culture?)
“You’d want to be careful about using a seed like that as a seasoning in a yogurt-based sauce or salad,” remarked one of us.
“Unless its sprouts are tasty.”
Start mixing yoghurt into the soil with increasing proportions over the generations. You’d create selection pressure for those conditions of pH, available nutrients, etc. You’d need to put a light in the refrigerator (on a timer to replicate a day-night cycle). You might hit some level of mixture where there just aren’t enough soil nutrients that aren’t present in yoghurt, though. And this would probably take too long for a normal science fair project…
I think there’s a very rare Scandinavian variety of orchid that actually does germinate preferentially in yogurt.
I am undergraduate intern for phytopathology lab and your puzzle is challenging. Considering that you can get most seeds to fairly easily germinate on normal agar I wouldn’t be surprised if they would on yogurt as well, as long as it is thick enough. I will be the skeptic here and ask are you sure that generic “seeds” do not already germinate in yogurt? Ofcourse, bacteria are the bane to any tissue culture, so you would likely need to autoclave the yogurt, which would do what to the consistency? A good experiment would be, autoclave the thickest yogurt you can find, pour it into some extra deep petri dish in sterile conditions, seal it to keep in the smell and keep out more bacteria, then leave in a convenient location at room temp. And in response to above, even light is non-essential if you are just testing for germination. Though a refrigerator would likely be too cold.
as per the preferentially part that that a different story, I don’t know enough about what is and isn’t in yogurt to really help you on that…
Lots of stuff germinates (if that’s the right word) in yogurt, why not seeds? I would try this experiment if I didn’t think my landlord would find out and object.