Ice Worms
A new study published in PLOS Genetics describes efforts by scientists to thaw a pair of roundworms (aka: nematodes) from Siberian permafrost, resurrecting them after about 46,000 of frozen slumber and then—remarkably—one of the worms started making babies.
The mechanism through which these worms were able to survive tens of thousands of years frozen in ice is called cryptobiosis, which basically means going into suspended animation in a below-zero temperature environment, not eating, lacking metabolism of any kind, but still being resuscitable on the other end, coming back to operational life (and still being procreation-viable, to boot).
Maybe the most interesting discovery noted in this paper, though, is that scientists were able to compare notes between this (new-to-science) species of nematode and a contemporary nematode species, identifying a key sugar—trehalose—that is necessary for successful cryptobiosis.
Without trehalose they can't pull off this trick, which points us toward more threads we might pull on to further understand the capacity of some species to go into this type of frozen hibernation.
None of which is immediately applicable to us, or really much of anything beyond our general understanding of biology and the species that surround us.
But there is a chance this could point us down some interesting avenues of exploration, helping us come up with new methods for preserving species that are threatened by climate change and helping us prepare out what we should expect as more of the planet's ice sheets melt, an array of interesting (and maybe worrying) ancient micro- and macro-organisms defrosting—some of them maybe still alive and keen to make more of themselves in a radically different environment from the one in which they evolved.
This is also potentially intriguing for future explorations into preserving human tissues and organs, and maybe even complete human beings, someday, for space exploration purposes or for putting folks with diseases and conditions we can't cure yet into suspended animation, waking them up in the future after we've developed the requisite cures.
That latter application is very science fiction and nowhere close to being a reality, today, but every single discovery—contemporarily relevant to us or not—can lead to new tools and superpowers for our species, alongside the more immediate benefits of broadening our knowledge horizons and allowing us to make decisions from a place of ever-widening perspective.
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