A female microscopic roundworm that spent the last 46,000 years in suspended animation deep in the Siberian permafrost has been revived and has started having babies in a laboratory dish.
frozen soil the nematode was embedded in came from an ancient gopher hole, excavated fromScientists used radiocarbon dating to determine that the soil was 46,000 years old, give or take a thousand years.“The age over which it survived is one of the shocking things,” said Gregory Copenhaver, a co-editor of PLOS Genetics and director of the Institute for Convergent Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The original 46,000-year-old nematode is no longer alive, but scientists have continued to raise more than 100 generations from this single nematode. The species reproduces without a mate through a process called parthenogenesis.What intrigues the researchers is not just the age of the specimen, but how it enters a state of limbo.the new nematode species survives freezing and drying out better if it is exposed to mildly desiccating conditions before the deep freeze.
Study co-leader Teymuras Kurzchalia, a professor emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, said that efforts to unravel which proteins are necessary for the process are ongoing, using tools that can silence or knock out genes.
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