By: Amy Jin

Some 46,000 years ago, when the wooly mammoth still roamed the Earth, two roundworms got confined in the Siberian permafrost.

About four millenia later, the pair of worms defrosted and started to wiggle, proving that life could be paused almost forever.

This finding (published by PLOS Genetics) offers an understanding of how these nematodes (worms) can survive in extreme circumstances for a long amount of time.

In 2018, scientist Anastasia Shatilovich (from the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science RAS in Russia) melted two female worms that were dug up inside a frozen burrow by gophers in the Arctic.

The worms were frozen and buried in approximately 130 feet of frozen ground. Later, however, scientists were able to revive the worms by placing them in water.

After the worms’ revival, the creatures were sent to Germany for further study. There, scientists reported that the worms had died in the lab after a few days and had reproduced several generations of worms in that short amount of time.

Through the use of radiocarbon dating, researchers determined that the worms had been frozen in the late Pleistocene (Ice Age) from about 45,839 to 47,769 years ago.

“No nematodes had been known to achieve such a dormant state for thousands of years at a time,” Teymuras Kurzchalia, a professor at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, proclaimed on Saturday.

The worms used a process called cryptobiosis to survive the extreme cold. Cryptobiosis is a state where life pauses but still lives on, and the researchers at the institute have been trying to understand this procedure and its impact on the worms.

Researchers have identified certain DNA segments in the worms that help them go into a dormant state. It contains the same genes as Caenorhabditis elegans (the roundworm), a creature that can also achieve cryptobiosis.

From this study, they also learned that the nematodes could not survive without certain resources. Dr. Kurzchalia states, “This led us, for instance, to understand that they cannot survive without a specific sugar called trehalose.”

Although there are no “clear practical applications for a deep understanding of cryptobiosis,” Dr. Kurzchalia wants to continue the research.

He says that the discovery of semiconductors took a long time to provide a use, but when it did, it was extraordinary. “That’s the interest of science…You end somewhere you didn’t presume.”

With Credits to: