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This is not the first time we hear about organisms able to resurrect after spending thousands, even millions of years, but the protagonists of this feat are usually bacteria . The return of the ice is a much more difficult trick for complex organisms. These humble verses just succeeded
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Worms belong to a large family with more than 25,000 species called nematodes. A team of Russian biologists found these small organisms frozen in the Siberian permafrost. After leaving them for a few weeks at a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, they watched in astonishment as they gradually recovered the vital functions. They had been frozen for 42,000 years.
Biologists have ruled that organisms can come from pollution. Normally, nematodes do not penetrate deeply into the soil and appeared in samples taken at depths greater than 3.5 meters, where the soil is not subject to seasonal changes. It has simply been frozen for thousands of years in the cold Siberian tundra.
Figure sprays the previous record of nematodes, which was in 39 years. In fact, it surpasses by landslide the recording of a species related to them and of which much has been written for its singular resistance: the tardigrades. The most extreme case of a tardigrade recovering vital functions after an extended period of hibernation is 30 years.
The tardigrades are able to avoid cell damage repairing their own DNA and crystallizing their tissues in case of need of sleep for a long period of time in order to avoid the extreme conditions of dying. humidity (environments without water) or temperature (extreme cold). The study of the biological mechanisms that allowed nematodes to survive for 42,000 years is of great importance to achieve practical progress in cryo-medicine but also in astrobiology. Perhaps in the future, they will be the key to developing human cryopreservation systems for interstellar space travel. [Doklady Biological Sciences vía Science Alert]
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