How MSU is bringing shipwrecked seeds back to life

In November 1878, the wooden schooner James R. Bentley set sail from Chicago bound for Buffalo loaded with a large shipment of rye. During the voyage, it encountered heavy seas and gale-force winds and struck a shoal near 40 Mile Point Lighthouse in Lake Huron just north of Rogers City. The damage was severe, and the ship sunk. All crew members were rescued, but the rye was not.

Fast forward to Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024: two small boats with a total crew of six traveled from Cheboygan five miles out in Lake Huron to the site of the shipwreck, which was located in 1984. Two divers began the 160-foot dive to the Bentley. With a specially made tube, the divers were able to extract a substantial number of seeds from the Bentley in 39-degree water. They immediately put the tubes with the seeds on ice.

Time now ticking for the seeds (due to the warm weather and oxygen), the crew rushed back to shore, loaded the seeds into the van of Chad Munger, MSU alum and owner, founder and CEO of Mammoth Distilling and Consolidated Rye and Whiskey. Munger rushed the seeds to MSU — a three-hour trip. He took the seeds to the lab of MSU Associate Professor Eric Olson, an expert in wheat breeding and genetics.

When the tubes were finally opened, Olson was elated to see that the seeds looked viable, though only time would tell.

The history of rye in Michigan

In 1909, Joseph Rosen, a former student of Frank Spragg, a plant breeder at MSU — then called Michigan Agricultural College — sent Spragg a sample of rye seeds from Russia. Spragg named the rye after Rosen and planted the first crops in Michigan in 1912.

However, rye was difficult to grow because it cross-pollinated easily, which reduced the quality of the crop. Spragg knew that he needed to find a way to isolate the rye crop to protect it. And he and Rosen found the perfect spot — South Manitou Island — an 8-square-mile island located in Lake Michigan about 17 miles west of Leland. Spragg was sure the isolated island would prevent cross-pollination, and it did.

The rye was a success, and by the mid-1910s, Michigan was the largest rye-producing state in the country, largely due to MSU. But around 1970, farmers stopped because “nobody would pay them to grow it,” Munger said. “They would make more money selling corn and soybeans because that’s what the market demanded.”

Finding the Rosen rye

Rosen rye might have been lost forever if it wasn’t for Ari Sussman, Munger’s collaborator at Mammoth Distilling in Central Lake, near Traverse City.

“Ari was at MSU looking for old advertisements in popular magazines when he came across a 1934 Christmas issue of Vanity Fair with an ad for Schenley Whiskey, which was one of the big brands at the time,” Munger said. “The ad had a picture of the label that read, ‘This whiskey made from the purest rye on earth from South Manitou Island in Michigan, Rosen rye.’ We had never heard of Rosen rye, and it also wasn’t well known in the industry either. We were amazed that it was once grown right in our own backyard.

“We both immediately recognized that this was significant because we’re always looking for a way to use local grains and weave storytelling in the whiskey we make.”

Resurrecting the Rosen rye

Munger set out to see if Rosen rye seeds still existed somewhere and they did — in a U.S. Department of Agriculture seed bank in Idaho.

“I contacted them, and they told me a little bit about where they had gotten them from, which happened to be MSU,” Munger said. “The seeds came to the USDA from the original MSU seed bank. As soon as I heard that, I started calling around MSU.”

And that’s when he found Eric Olson, associate professor in plant, soil and microbial sciences in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Munger gave Olson a tiny manila envelope from the USDA that contained 20 grams of seeds, which equals only approximately 20 seeds.

“We showed Eric the seeds and asked, ‘Hey, can you do this? Can you bring this back to viability on a commercial scale and is it worth it?’ And of course, he said yes.”

“We grew those 20 seeds to 200 then to 2,000,” Olson said. “Over time, we were able to grow enough to plant them back on South Manitou Island.”

Though the Rosen rye resurrection was a success, Olson said getting the Bentley rye seeds to germinate was going to be exceedingly more difficult.

“We didn’t have to go to the depths of Lake Huron to get the Rosen rye seeds,” Olson said. “We also didn’t have to overcome the technical challenges of trying to break seed dormancy and revive the seed, so Rosen rye had a big head start, and the Bentley seeds are much older than the Rosen seeds were.”

Resurrecting the Bentley rye  

When Olson saw the seeds pour out of the tubes, just hours after being rescued from their watery grave, he said it was “like winning a million-dollar jackpot.”

“It was remarkable to see those seeds pouring out. It was so exciting to potentially achieve what we set out to do, which was to revive this variety and bring back a piece of agricultural history,” he said. “The Bentley seeds capture an agricultural era that precedes Rosen, one that didn’t have much mechanization. The idea of the seeds germinating is so exciting, but the odds are stacked against us because they’ve been underwater for 145 years.”

To resurrect the seeds, Olson and his team placed them in germination boxes and soaked them in gibberellic acid, which is a plant hormone that breaks down seed dormancy and stimulates germination. Olson said it’s like “Miracle-Gro on steroids.”

The team then used three different processes to encourage the seeds to germinate — a warm, room-temperature germination; a cold germination at 4 degrees Celsius; and some were dried and then imbibed with water.

But the rye seeds didn’t germinate.

This tells Olson that even though the structure of the seed cells was preserved by the cold water and low oxygen environment, their viability was not. Germination requires viable mitochondria — a structure in the cells that are responsible for converting glucose and sugars into energy that drives cellular metabolism. So, the mitochondria must have lost viability as a result of the seeds being in the water for so long.

“This was a huge human endeavor. What we did was challenging and difficult, but we didn’t shy away from it,” Olson said. “We’re the best qualified group in the entire U.S. to be trying this because we have all the resources right at our fingertips. And MSU just has this environment where you can make anything possible.”

How the Bentley rye will live on

Since the rye couldn’t reproduce itself from seeds, Olson has another plan — extract DNA from the seeds — or at least pieces of it.

“Once we get the DNA, we can sequence it and figure out what this rye is, or what it’s related to,” Olson said. “There are multiple rye genomes that have been sequenced across the world and we essentially have the entire USDA rye collection here at MSU. We can compare the sequence of modern rye varieties to this variety and determine what’s the origin. And we can look at historical rye varieties from across the world and determine where this rye variety may have originally come from.”

Historically, rye now grown in the U.S. came from Poland, Germany, Eastern Ukraine and Western Russia. When people traveled from Europe, they would have brought their rye seeds with them.

“The seeds aren’t dead at all,” Olson notes. “We can revive the genes that were carried in the seeds and use modern genome sequencing techniques to assemble parts of the genome. We’ll be able to sequence the chromosomes of this rye and transfer those chromosome segments into a modern rye variety, essentially reviving a historic rye.

Olson and team will do this with the help of MSU’s Research Technology Support Facility Genomics Core that keeps pace with the ever-broadening world of genomic technology and makes the research process as simple as possible.

“This will be the first attempt in the world at large-scale chromosome engineering in rye,” he said. “No one is doing anything with rye because it’s an orphan crop in the U.S. — it does not have the same level of investment as corn or soybeans. But if we do this, we are creating a template for rye improvement by marrying the old with the new and taking traits of the old and creating a rye that has character like it did decades ago.”

The vision

So why do this? Munger said the goal here is to create a new variety of rye specifically for the distilling industry and to create something impactful to the entire state — a Michigan Rye Trail much like the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.

“The Michigan Rye Trail will be more than just visiting distilleries all over the state that are making Michigan rye whiskey; we will help growers who are growing Rosen rye for us, and eventually Bentley rye,” Munger said. “We want to see Michigan recreate the economy it had built purposefully around growing rye 120 years ago. One of the ways we can do that is create a market for Michigan rye outside the state. And we’re going to do that with history — Rosen rye and Bentley rye.

“If you pick up a bottle of whiskey today, anywhere in the world, you wouldn’t see the variety of grain that was used to make it on the label. The big bourbon distillers get all their rye from Europe, and they don’t want people to know that. We want people to know where their grain came from — and that’s proudly grown in Michigan.”

It’s about connecting people with agriculture and doing so in a way that grows agrotourism in the state. Munger said farms along the trail will also become small distillers, similar to the single-estate growers in Scotland and Ireland. People will be able to go to the farm where the rye is grown, see the operation, and taste and buy whiskey that was made just from the grain grown right there.

Olson said the creation of a Michigan Rye Trail and reviving old rye will create great opportunities for Michigan agriculture.

“If we can introduce the Bentley shipwreck rye chromosome segments into Rosen rye, this will have huge appeal for visitors and create several opportunities for rural farmers,” Olson said.

“The shipwrecked Bentley seeds are important because it gives us an opportunity to create something that’s never existed before,” Munger said. “This is about the positive impact of agrotourism and history — the history of the state, the history of MSU and the revival and recreation of rye agriculture.”

Read more about the dive and Olson’s effort to revive the Bentley rye in The New York Times (may require registration or a paid subscription.)