This multicellular animal frozen for 24,000 years, comes back to life, reproduces

Hyderabad: It is not every day that you hear about someone who is old… super old, like 24,000 -years-old. According to the last Census conducted in India in 2011, India had a total of about 6 lakh individuals aging over 100, translating to just 0.5 per cent of the country’s 121.cr population at the time […]

Hyderabad: It is not every day that you hear about someone who is old… super old, like 24,000 -years-old. According to the last Census conducted in India in 2011, India had a total of about 6 lakh individuals aging over 100, translating to just 0.5 per cent of the country’s 121.cr population at the time of the Census.

If you think that is super old and unique, wait until you read about this multicellular microorganism which was found to be 24,000-years-old, freezing in the Siberian permafrost, only to come back alive and successfully reproduce multiple times with an asexual form of reproduction called the ‘parthenogenesis’.

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Discovered and revived by researchers from the Soil Cryology Laboratory, Russia, these microorganisms called ‘Bdelloid Rotifers’ are said to have survived so long by shutting themselves down almost completely, in a state called ‘cryptobiosis’.

Rotifers had been earlier reported to survive up to 10 years when frozen. However, in the new study, the researchers used radiocarbon-dating to determine that the rotifers they recovered from the permafrost were about 24,000 years old.

In their studies, the researchers discovered that the rotifers could withstand the formation of ice crystals that happens during slow freezing, suggesting that they have some mechanism to shield their cells and organs from harm at exceedingly low temperatures.

“Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism,” says Stas Malavin of the Soil Cryology Laboratory.

“The takeaway is that a multicellular organism can be frozen and stored as such for thousands of years and then return back to life — a dream of many fiction writers,” he added.

Remember Tardigrades, the multi-legged microscopic organism, sometimes called as the water bears and often referred to as the strongest living organisms? Looks like they are not that fancy any more. Bdelloid Rotifers, surviving for 24,000 years are the new strongest organisms and they surpass the Tardigrades’ record by miles!

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