So far unknown eutardigrades found in India can live under s sterilization UV lamp without breaking a sweat. How? By glowing!
Image by Adrian Malec from Pixabay
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Tardigrades are well known so being able to survive through the most extreme of environments. No matter whether on Earth or in Space. They can freeze in ice, dry up, find themselves in acid, even in a vacuum, and happily live in irradiated areas. So, is there anything left about them to fascinate us? Well, if there wasn’t there would not be an article about it here!
Indian scientists recently found tardigrades that can easily live through hard UV radiation that is used for sterilization of viruses and bacteria. And as it tends to be in these cases, the discovery was an accident. Researchers from the Indian Institute of Science gathered tardigrades around their campus and tried out what they can survive through. Among others, they also had a sterilization UV light so they tried it as well.
They sprayed the tardigrades with a dose of 1 KJ of UV radiation per square meter. This dose is capable of killing bacteria in just 5 minutes. When it came to tardigrades, first they tried it on the well-known species Hypsibius exemplaris for fifteen minutes and most of them died in the next 24 hours. Just as expected. But then they took these strange reddish tardigrades and used the same does all of them survived. So they increased the dose to be four times as strong – quite a devastating dose – and still, about 60 % lived for more than a month.
Soon they found out that this is a so far unknown species of tardigrades from the genus Paramcrobiotus. And the best thing is that the scientists know how the UV-resistant tardigrades survive. When they observed them in an inverted fluorescent microscope and shined some UV on them the tardigrades in question suddenly went blue.
So, it seems that these tardigrades have a fluorescent pigment under their skin which can transform UV radiation into harmless blue light. And the more of the pigment the tardigrades have the better they are are at resisting UV radiation.
That wasn’t enough for the scientists though! They also extracted the pigment out of the tardigrades and used it to try to protect other less UV-susceptible tardigrades. These were then capable of surviving up to two times better than without the protection.
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