LIFE AFTER DEATH BREAKTHROUGH: 42,000 year old worms frozen in Siberia come BACK TO LIFE
WORMS frozen in permafrost have come back to life after up to 42,000 years, say scientists. Two nematodes from Siberia are moving and eating again for the first time since the Pleistocene age, it is reported.
By WILL STEWART
Express.co.uk
Thu, Jul 26, 2018
The ancient roundworms – frozen since the era of woolly mammoths – started wriggling again in Petri dishes at a Russian institute in a breakthrough which has major implications for cryomedicine and astrobiology, say experts.
A Russian team working with geoscientists from Princeton University in the US succeeded in coaxing the frozen worms back to life.
“We have obtained the first data demonstrating the capability of multicellular organisms for longterm cryobiosis in permafrost deposits of the Arctic,” states their report.
Some 300 prehistoric worms were analysed – and two ‘were shown to contain viable nematodes’.
“After being defrosted, the nematodes showed signs of life – they started moving and eating,” said another report on the findings cited by The Siberian Times.
One of the worms was from a site near the Alazeya River, found in permafrost in 2015, and believed to be some 41,700 years old.
The other was taken in 2002 from an prehistoric squirrel burrow in Duvanny Yar outcrop in the lower reaches of the Kolyma River, and is around 32,000 years old.
This is close to the site of Pleistocene Park, an experimental project seeking to recreate the Arctic habitat of the extinct woolly mammoth.
Both sites are in Yakutia – the coldest region in Russia.
The worms were coaxed back to life in Petri dishes in a laboratory at the Institute of Physico-Chemical and Biological Problems of Soil Science near Moscow.
The breakthrough demonstrates “the ability of multicellular organisms to survive long-term – tens of thousands of years” in a state of “natural cryoconservation”, said the scientists in a new report in Doklady Biological Sciences.
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