By: Nate Lu
In the days that the wooly mammoth roamed the chilling lands of the Earth, a small pair of roundworms became frozen in the Siberian Permafrost.
Millennia later, this pair of roundworms proved to scientists that life could be stopped and put into pause almost “indefinitely.”
5 years ago, Anastatia Shatilovich, a scientist from the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science RAS in Russia, dug out two female roundworms from a burrow dug by gophers, burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae, in the Arctic.
Buried approximately 130 feet in the permafrost, a thick subsurface layer of soil that remains frozen throughout the year, occurring chiefly in polar regions, was brought back to life simply by putting it in water, stated by a news release from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Germany. According to The New York Times, “The worms, which were buried approximately 130 feet in the permafrost, were revived simply by putting them in water,” This shows that although this process of “pausing life” could seem very complicated, the process is actually very simple.
By using radiocarbon dating, a scientific method that can accurately determine the age of organic materials as old as approximately 60,000 years, scientists concluded that the worms were put into permafrost between 45,839 and 47,769 years ago. This period was during the late Pleistocene era. These tiny worms were able to stand against rough extreme temperatures by going into a state called cryptobiosis, “a process researchers at the institute have been trying to understand,” stated from The New York Times. This opposes the idea of the process of “pausing life” being simple by showing that the specimens went into a dormant state of cryptobiosis, something that researchers are trying to understand.
Dr. Kurzchalia, a Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Germany who was involved in the study said, “The major take-home message or summary of this discovery is that it is, in principle, possible to stop life for more or less an indefinite time and then restart it.”
One study, by Dr. Philipp Schiffer of the Institute for Zoology at the University of Cologne, said that we could learn and be educated by the adaptation of organisms to extreme environmental conditions. Dr. Philipp states, “In times of global warming we can learn a lot about adaptation to extreme environmental conditions from these organisms, informing conservation strategies and protecting ecosystems from collapsing.”
The discovery of these two female roundworms has potentially led to us learning more about the adaptations of these organisms, and how they resisted the rough conditions that they had to go through.