In vitro culture, cryopreservation, and field reintroduction of the endangered Mingan thistle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current plant conservation efforts are hindered by, for example, poor seed germination, low viability, and insufficient propagation and preservation technologies. To address these problems, we devised an approach to plant conservation that integrates conservation, preservation, and restoration (CPR), which uses advanced in vitro techniques. We applied our method to the endangered plant species, Mingan thistle (Cirsium minganense Vict). We used micropropagation, embryo rescue, and cryopreservation, which together allowed germplasm banking, habitat restoration, and species recovery. Overcoming the natural dormancy and low viability of C. minganense seeds, embryo rescue achieved a remarkable 100% germination rate, highlighting its potential to bypass germination barriers. Optimal micropropagation protocols enhanced shoot proliferation and rooting and yielded vigorous plantlets with a nearly 100% survival during acclimatization. Cryopreservation protocols for in-vitro-grown shoot tips and seeds successfully preserved genetic diversity, which furthered immediate restoration efforts and long-term germplasm storage. Reintroductions of micropropagated and cryopreserved plants in the Mingan Archipelago National Park Reserve, Quebec, Canada, had high survival rates (average 90% after 2 years of transplant) and prolific flowering. Our results emphasize the importance of combining seed-based and in vitro propagation techniques to create genetically diverse and resilient plant populations and the value of cryobanking for ensuring germplasm availability under changing environmental conditions. The CPR strategy offers a scalable framework for conserving endangered plant species, safeguarding genetic diversity, and restoring ecosystems to support long-term biodiversity resilience.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".