Researchers Finally Discover Why the Water Bear is Almost Indestructible

The tardigrade, also called as the moss piglet or water bear is a strange, microscopic creature that appears like something out of a Disney nightmare scene: strange but not especially threatening. The pudgy, eight-legged, water-borne animal seems perpetually puckering. It’s the farthest thing from what you ‘d expect an unstoppable organism to appear like.

The water bear

Yet, one experiment showed that water bears can withstand even the vacuum of space. A kind of microscopic Rasputin, tardigrades have been frozen, boiled, exposed to extreme radiation dosages, and remarkably still survive. How they do this has been a secret to science previously.

Being a water-borne animal, researchers in this experiment analyzed how it survived desiccation or being completely dried. When it senses an oncoming dry time, the critter brings its head and also limbs into its exoskeleton, making itself into a small sphere. It’ll remain that way, unmoving until it’s reintroduced into water.

It’s this incredible capability that piqued Thomas Boothby’s interest. He is a scientist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Boothby informed The New York Times, “They can stay like that in a dry state for many years, even years, and when you put them back in water, they revive within hrs.” Then, “They are running around once again; they are eating; they are reproducing as if nothing happened.”

Water Bear Protection Mechanism

Initially, it was believed that the water bear employed a sugar known as trehalose to shield its cells from damage. Brine shrimp (sea monkeys) and nematode worms utilize this sugar to protect against desiccation by means of a process known as anhydrobiosis. Those organisms generate enough of the sugar to make it 20% of their body weight.

Not the water bear. Trehalose only takes up regarding 2% of its entire system when it is in stasis. Though employing a sugar to preserve one’s body sounds strange, the recently found procedure that the water bear goes through is even more strange. It turns itself into glass.

In this study, tardigrades were put into a drying-out chamber that mimicked conditions the organisms would encounter in a going-away pond. As the water bears underwent anhydrobiosis, researchers examined what genes were activated. These genes generated a specific protein, which they called tardigrade-specific intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs).

When the genes which generate TDPs were blocked, the water bears passed away. “If you take those genes and place them into organisms like bacteria and yeast, which typically do not have these proteins, they, in fact, become much more desiccation-tolerant,” Boothby stated.

Drying procedure

It’s when the drying procedure begins that such genes are activated, flooding the water bear’s system with the protective protein. According to Boothby, the process occurs in much the same way as trehalose protects sea monkeys. This is an instance of convergent evolution when 2 unrelated organisms create the same trait for survival.

Typically, proteins are formed in orderly, 3D chains of amino acids. However, TDPs run differently, in a kind of random, somewhat disorganized way. Dr. Boothby stated, “It’s a really interesting question about how a protein without a specified three-dimensional structure can, in fact, carry out its function in a cell.” Another question, is this protein utilized by any other organisms?

When desiccation starts and TDP is activated, it engages a process known as vitrification. Boothby stated, “The glass is coating the molecules inside of the tardigrade cells, maintaining them undamaged.” From there, it goes into a form of stasis until it spots water. When that happens, the protein is dissolved into the liquid, and the tardigrade is revived.

Practical use of discovery

There could be some practical utilization to this discovery. For example, in medicine, vaccines frequently require refrigeration. However, it isn’t constantly available in the developing world, which makes delivering vaccines to vulnerable rural communities challenging.

Subscribe for counterintuitive, unexpected, and impactful stories delivered to your inbox every
Dr. Boothby believes that we might be able to use TDP to kind of freeze-dry vaccines or medications for simple storage and transport. What regarding putting humans in stasis for space travel or when they have terminal illnesses to await a cure? No word on that yet. Researchers have years of research ahead of them currently, simply to understand the inner workings of TDP.

Some believe tardigrades may have “alien” DNA. To find out more, click here:

Read the original article on Big Think.

Read more: Dolphins Are Screaming Because of Underwater Drilling Noise, Scientists Say