PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Anastasia Shatilovich
AU  - Vamshidhar R. Gade
AU  - Martin Pippel
AU  - Tarja T. Hoffmeyer
AU  - Alexei V. Tchesunov
AU  - Lewis Stevens
AU  - Sylke Winkler
AU  - Graham M. Hughes
AU  - Sofia Traikov
AU  - Michael Hiller
AU  - Elizaveta Rivkina
AU  - Philipp H. Schiffer
AU  - Eugene W Myers
AU  - Teymuras V. Kurzchalia
TI  - Nematodes can survive in a suspended form of life for indefinite time
AID  - 10.1101/2022.01.28.478251
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2022.01.28.478251
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/01/28/2022.01.28.478251.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/01/28/2022.01.28.478251.full
AB  - When environmental conditions are unfavorable, such as the complete absence of water or oxygen, high temperature, freezing or extreme salinity, some organisms can enter suspended animation (cryptobiosis)1. This reversible transition is preceded by execution of complex genetic and biochemical programs (preconditioning)2,3,4. Under laboratory conditions, however, animals have only been maintained in a viable cryptobiotic state for a short time. Here we show that desiccation followed by freezing allows C. elegans dauer larvae to retain full viability over very long periods (around 500 days). Consistent with this finding, recently nematode individuals have been reanimated from the Siberian permafrost5, that according to precise radiocarbon dating shows that they remained in cryptobiosis since the late Pleistocene, for about 46,000 years. Phylogenomic inference based on our high-quality genome assembly and morphological analysis demonstrate that these nematodes belong to a novel parthenogenetic species, which we named Panagrolaimus kolymaensis. Genome analysis revealed that the core of the molecular toolkit for cryptobiosis in P. kolymaensis and C. elegans is orthologous. To survive desiccation and freezing under laboratory conditions these two species display similar biochemical responses. Thus, nematodes possess extraordinarily robust adaptive mechanisms that potentially allow them to remain in suspended animation over geological time scales.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.