They woke after a Sleep of 24,000 Years..!!!

Recently in many science blogs, we have seen the news about some microscopic animal that has been revived after a sleep of 24,000 years, but it’s not the first case when some living thing has been reported with such extraordinary ability. For example, stems of Antarctic moss were successfully regrown from an over millennium-old sample covered by ice for about 400 years. Likewise, whole campion plants were regenerated from seed tissue preserved in relict 32,000-year-old permafrost, and nematodes were revived from the permafrost of two localities in northeastern Siberia, with source sediments dated over 30,000 years ago.

This case is about microscopic multicellular animals called bdelloid rotifers are known for their ability to survive extremely low temperatures. They had been reported to survive 6-10 years when frozen between minus 20 and 0 degrees Celsius. Now, an international team of biologists has successfully revived bdelloid rotifers that have been frozen in the Siberian permafrost for 24,000 years. They used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of rotifers that they recovered from the Siberian permafrost.

“Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals called bdelloid rotifers could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism,” said Dr. Stas Malavin, a researcher at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science.

Once thawed, the rotifers were able to reproduce in a clonal process known as parthenogenesis. To follow the process of freezing and recovery of the ancient creatures, the researchers froze and then thawed dozens of rotifers in the lab. The studies showed the rotifers could withstand the formation of ice crystals that happens during slow freezing. It suggests they have some mechanism to shield their cells and organs from harm at exceedingly low temperatures.

“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,” Dr. Malavin said.

“Of course, the more complex the organism, the trickier it is to preserve it alive frozen and, for mammals, it’s not currently possible.”

“Yet, moving from a single-celled organism to an organism with a gut and brain, though microscopic, is a big step forward.”

“It’s not yet clear what it takes to survive on ice for even a few years and whether the leap to thousands makes much difference. That’s a question that requires further study.”

The team’s paper was published on June 7, 2021 issue of the journal Current Biology. 

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So why this kind of discovery is important, this is because if in future, humankind wants to travel in deep space which would be light-years apart, they will have to come up with novel technologies might be inspired from this rotifer discovery, to put humans in a state of cryo freeze sleep so that they could live for a longer span.