Perhaps it's time to change
the definition of mummy from "preserved animals and humans" to
"preserved living things." So perhaps a potato can be a mummy,
as long as it is preserved years beyond its normal life span.
Case in point:
A potato mummy is helping scientists track down the cause of Ireland's
Great Potato Famine of the 1840s.
The famine, which killed
more than a million people in Ireland and cause another million to leave
their homeland, was brought about by a blight that destroyed the Irish
potato crop.
Jean Ristaino, a plant
pathologist at North Carolina State University, wanted to know what caused
the blight and where it came from. Ristaino's unique approach was to visit
herbariums in England, Boston, and Maryland, where she was allowed to take
samples from 150 year-old dried (and therefore mummified?) potato plant
leaves. Then she looked at their DNA and compared it to the DNA of modern
potato plants.
Her research turned up a
fungus-like pathogen which was the plant-killing culprit. This finding
will now allow her to develop the genes in the pathogen so scientists can
trace the origins of the blight and its route to Ireland.
