Category: Science News

{The rusty patched bumblebee, Bombus affinis, recently became the first U.S. bumblebee species to be placed on the endangered species list, but a Kansas State University entomologist says bumblebee endangerment is nothing to be bugged about.}

Jeff Whitworth, associate professor of entomology, said bumblebees are not headed for extinction. However, their populations have decreased in some states, so inclusion in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Federal Register may help keep them and other bee species at healthy population levels.

“Being on the endangered species list is not bad,” Whitworth said. “It helps people have more awareness and information about bees, and it leads to regulations and programs that help keep bees alive.”

Some people fear bees because they occasionally sting, but Whitworth said bees will not bother people if people do not bother them. He said bees are beneficial because they pollinate flowers, citrus crops and vegetables, and they serve as food sources for other insects, birds and fish.

“If bees go away, other organisms go away, too,” Whitworth said. “It’s a domino effect.”

Bee declines are attributed to a variety of factors, including parasites, pesticides and urbanization, as well as fungal, bacterial and viral diseases. They also are affected by the introduction of non-native plant species and natural disasters, from floods to drought.

Whitworth said bee populations could be protected by areas of native plants and grasses, conservation-focused farming and gardening methods, and the hobby of beekeeping, which is growing in both rural and urban areas. These protective practices help turn one’s backyard — even a little piece of it — into a natural ecosystem.

To boost a backyard’s “natural factor,” Whitworth advises less frequent mowing and tree trimming. Less mowing means less soil disturbance, which is critical for bumblebees because they nest in the ground in mouse and gopher holes. Less tree trimming provides pollinators with more of a natural habitat, which is especially helpful for honeybees because they create colonies in trees.

Growers can help sustain bumblebee populations through no-till farming and gardening, as well as participation in the Farm Service Agency’s Conservation Reserve Program, which provides landowners with rental payments in exchange for their commitment to abstain from agricultural production on a portion of their property.

Whitworth predicts bee populations will continue to experience cycles of increase and decrease because of fluctuations in agriculture prices and year-round temperatures.

Bee populations change every year because when crops are more valuable, farmers will use more land for growing crops, but when crops are less valuable, farmers will leave more land to its natural state, Whitworth said. Similarly, when temperatures are colder for several years, bee populations decrease, but they increase again in hotter periods.

“Weather and prices vary from year to year, which is simply part of the way systems work,” Whitworth said. “I foresee bee populations staying fairly steady for the foreseeable future.”

{Children get more satisfaction from relationships with their pets than with their brothers or sisters, according to new research from the University of Cambridge. Children also appear to get on even better with their animal companions than with siblings.}

The research adds to increasing evidence that household pets may have a major influence on child development, and could have a positive impact on children’s social skills and emotional well-being.

Pets are almost as common as siblings in western households, although there are relatively few studies on the importance of child-pet relationships.

”Anyone who has loved a childhood pet knows that we turn to them for companionship and disclosure, just like relationships between people,” says Matt Cassells, a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the Department of Psychiatry, who led the study. “We wanted to know how strong these relationships are with pets relative to other close family ties. Ultimately this may enable us to understand how animals contribute to healthy child development”

This study, published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, was conducted in collaboration with the WALTHAM Centre for Pet Nutrition, part of Mars Petcare and co-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of a larger study, led by Prof Claire Hughes at the University of Cambridge Centre for Family Research. Researchers surveyed 12 year old children from 77 families with one or more pets of any type and more than one child at home. Children reported strong relationships with their pets relative to their siblings, with lower levels of conflict and greater satisfaction in owners of dogs than other kinds of pets.

”Even though pets may not fully understand or respond verbally, the level of disclosure to pets was no less than to siblings,” says Cassels. “The fact that pets cannot understand or talk back may even be a benefit as it means they are completely non-judgmental.

“While previous research has often found that boys report stronger relationships with their pets than girls do, we actually found the opposite. While boys and girls were equally satisfied with their pets, girls reported more disclosure, companionship, and conflict with their pet than did boys, perhaps indicating that girls may interact with their pets in more nuanced ways.”

“Evidence continues to grow showing that pets have positive benefits on human health and community cohesion,” says Dr Nancy Gee, Human-Animal Interaction Research Manager at WALTHAM and a co-author of the study. “The social support that adolescents receive from pets may well support psychological well-being later in life but there is still more to learn about the long term impact of pets on children’s development.”

{We all have particular experiences or particular things — a favorite song, for example — that mean much more to us than others. Now, researchers who’ve studied how perceptions of meaning change when people take the psychedelic drug known as LSD have traced that sense of meaningfulness to particular neurochemicals and receptors in the brain. The findings are reported in Current Biology on January 26.}

The findings add to our fundamental understanding of the human experience. They also point to potentially new targets for drugs to treat psychiatric illnesses or phobias, which come with abnormalities in the attribution of personal relevance to particular sensory experiences or cues, the researchers say.

“Our results increase our understanding of how personal relevance attribution is enabled in the brain,” says Katrin Preller of the Zürich University Hospital for Psychiatry. “[We now know] which receptors, neurotransmitters, and brain regions are involved when we perceive our environment as meaningful and relevant.”

Earlier studies showed that LSD alters the attribution of meaning and personal relevance to the environment, Preller explains. LSD also changes the way people perceive themselves, as the distinction between the self and the world outside the self blurs. But it wasn’t clear exactly what parts of the brain and which neurochemicals were responsible.

Preller and colleagues first confirmed the usual effects of LSD on study participants’ state of consciousness, mood, and anxiety in the lab. They found that those psychedelic effects of LSD were erased when participants took a second drug called ketanserin that blocked the ability of LSD to act on serotonin receptors known as 5-HT2ARs. That finding came as something of a surprise because LSD is also known to stimulate dopamine receptors, Preller says.

To explore LSD’s influence on the way people attribute meaning to things in their world, the researchers asked participants taking a placebo, LSD, or LSD plus ketanserin to rank the meaning attached to a series of songs. Some of those songs were ones that participants told the researchers were particularly meaningful to them. Others were either neutral or without meaning.

The researchers found that musical pieces that were previously meaningless to participants took on special meaning when those individuals were under the influence of LSD. That effect was diminished when participants were given the second drug to counteract LSD’s effects on the brain’s serotonin receptors. Brain imaging studies also linked those changing attributions of meaning to particular brain areas.

“By combining functional brain imaging and detailed behavioral assessments using a specific experimental paradigm to investigate personal relevance or meaning of music pieces, we were able to elucidate the neurobiological correlates of personal relevance processing in the brain,” Preller says. “We found that personal meaning attribution and its modulation by LSD is mediated by the 5-HT2A receptors and cortical midline structures that are also crucially involved in enabling the experience of a sense of self.”

Preller says they now plan to explore whether they observe the same effects in response to visual or tactile stimuli. They also hope to explore the relevance of their findings to dysfunctional attributions of meaning in people with psychiatric disorders.

“Excessive stimulation of 5-HT2A receptors seems to underlay the experience of loosening of self/ego boundaries, disrupted self-referential processing and thus the related impairment of making meaning and attributing personal relevance to percepts and experiences seen in various psychiatric disorders,” she says. “Therefore, it is important to consider this receptor subtype as potential target for the treatment of psychiatric illnesses characterized by alterations in personal relevance attribution.”

A separate study in Cell on the structure of LSD and its receptor, and what this teaches us about the drug’s potency, was also published on January 26.

This study was financially supported by grants from the Heffter Research Institute, the Swiss Neuromatrix Foundation, the Usona Institute, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

{Generosity, even among family members, had long been considered to be a specifically human characteristic. Yet rats, chimpanzees and other animals also exhibit similar behaviour. Rachel Dale, Friederike Range and colleagues, of the Messerli Research Institute at Vetmeduni Vienna had already shown that dogs also share food rewards with other dogs. Using a bar-pulling task, the dogs delivered the treats to partner dogs — especially if these were already known to them. A new study by the research team now used a more complex task set-up to confirm the prosocial behaviour of dogs. The experiment showed that dogs continued to prefer familiar partners. However, the increased complexity of the task influenced the readiness with which the dogs delivered a food reward to another animal. The study thus confirmed that the chosen method affects the result and is much more dependent on social proximity than had previously been assumed.}

{{Recognition of objects necessary for giving treats}}

Instead of pulling on a rope, the dogs in the present study had to recognize special objects in the form of tokens in order to deliver a food reward to the other dog. “This time we not only tested a different experimental set-up but also the level of difficulty,” explains Dale. “The dogs were first trained to touch a token in exchange for a food reward for themselves. They were then trained to recognize two more tokens: one that resulted in a reward being delivered to a partner dog and another which did not.” Three experiments were then conducted to test whether the dogs exhibited prosocial behaviour even in this more complex task and whether they would deliver a food reward to a partner or not. The researchers also tested whether it made a difference to the donor dog if the receiver was familiar or a stranger and whether the presence of another dog was enough to trigger generous behaviour in the test dog even if the partner had no access to the food.

{{Do dogs have to see the recipients to reward them?}}

The test set-up consisted of two enclosures. The test dog was trained to wait on a specific location in one enclosure until the researchers revealed a board containing the tokens. The dog could then choose to deliver a food reward to the receiver dog or not. In the first test, either a familiar dog or a stranger sat in the receiver enclosure. The dogs could see each other during the experiment. In the second test, the receiver enclosure remained empty but the other dog was present in the testing room. In a third test, the test dogs were alone in the entire set-up. At the end of each test series, the donor animals could reward themselves by being allowed to touch the token that delivered the food reward to them. This was done to ensure that the dogs remained motivated and unstressed and did not become distracted by an unfamiliar dog.

{{Dogs remain charitable even in complex tasks}}

The experiment confirmed that dogs continue to exhibit prosocial behaviour despite the more complex task. The dogs clearly showed a preference for sharing the food reward with a familiar dog. Unfamiliar dogs were rewarded nearly three times less often than familiar ones. The higher level of complexity, however, impacted the general frequency of the food delivery. This influence could be shown among dogs for the first time by comparing the token choice experiment with the simpler bar-pulling set-up and confirms the results of similar tests performed with small children and chimpanzees.

{{Presence of a partner makes dogs more likely to share}}

The behavioural biologists found another significant difference regarding the question whether the presence of a partner was important for the motivation of the test dog. Even when a second dog was present in the testing room without being in the other enclosure, the donor dogs were more motivated to give a food reward. When the test dogs were alone in the room, the number of food deliveries went down.

This aspect, known as social facilitation, could not be shown in the first study. The social facilitation theory starts from the assumption that animals will perform more readily in the presence of conspecifics. Given a more complex task, the presence of a partner appears to play a greater role. In this case, too, the donor dogs preferred familiar partners. “The difference was smaller, however, than when there was direct visual contact. Social facilitation should therefore be considered and controlled more strongly in future studies and in simple experiments,” says Range.

{The report in the journal Science was based on 400 youths aged between five and seven, who were given a series of tasks.}

Gender stereotypes emerge early, and by age six, girls are less likely to believe females are “brilliant” and more likely to believe boys are, according to a study released Thursday.

The report in the journal Science was based on 400 youths aged between five and seven, who were given a series of tasks.

In one, the kids were told a short story about a person who was “really, really smart,” but were given no hints about whether the person was male or female.

At age five, both boys and girls were equally likely to choose their own gender as “really, really smart.”

But by age six and seven, “girls were significantly less likely than boys to associate brilliance with their own gender,” said the study.

In another part of the study, children had to guess which of four children, two boys and two girls, got the best grades in school.

In this case, both younger and older girls were just as likely to select girls as having top grades, suggesting that the “girls’ perceptions of school achievement were separate from their perceptions of brilliance,” said the report.

Finally, when the kids were asked about their interest in two new games, one for “children who are really, really smart” and the other for “children who try really, really hard,” researchers found that girls aged six and seven were less interested than boys in the game for smart children.

At age five, girls were just as likely to pick the whiz kids’ game as the game for kids who try hard.

The findings may have important implications for the career paths that women choose, perhaps steering them away from fields typically associated with brilliance, like physics and philosophy, said lead author Lin Bian, a researcher at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champlain.

“It is likely to affect women’s career aspirations,” she said.

“We believe it is important to explore whether and how early young kids start learning these stereotypes associating brilliance with males.”

{New research reveals the shape of our brain can provide surprising clues about how we behave and our risk of developing mental health disorders.}

Florida State University College of Medicine Associate Professor Antonio Terracciano joined a team of researchers from the United States, United Kingdom and Italy to examine the connection between personality traits and brain structure. Their study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, looked at differences in the anatomy of the cortex (the outer layer of the brain) as indexed by three measures — the thickness, area, and amount of folding in the cortex — and how these measures related to the five major personality traits.

The traits include neuroticism, the tendency to be in a negative emotional state; extraversion, the tendency to be sociable and enthusiastic; openness, how open-minded a person is; agreeableness, a measure of altruism and cooperativeness; and conscientiousness, a measure of self-control and determination.

The study involved an imaging dataset from more than 500 individuals made publicly available by the Human Connectome Project, an ambitious effort by the National Institutes of Health to map neural pathways underlying human brain function.

“Evolution has shaped our brain anatomy in a way that maximizes its area and folding by reducing thickness of the cortex,” said senior author Luca Passamonti from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge. “It’s like stretching and folding a rubber sheet — this increases the surface area, but at the same time the sheet itself becomes thinner. We refer to this as the ‘cortical stretching hypothesis.’”

“Cortical stretching is a key evolutionary mechanism that enabled human brains to expand rapidly while still fitting into our skulls, which grew at a slower rate than the brain,” Terracciano added. “Interestingly, this same process occurs as we develop and grow in the womb and throughout childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood: The thickness of the cortex tends to decrease while the area and folding increase.”

In other research, Terracciano and others have shown that as people get older, neuroticism goes down — people become better at handling emotions — while conscientiousness and agreeableness go up — people become progressively more responsible and less antagonistic.

The researchers found that high levels of neuroticism, which may predispose people to develop neuro-psychiatric disorders, were associated with increased thickness as well as reduced area and folding in some regions of the cortex, such as the prefrontal-temporal cortices.

In contrast, openness, which is a personality trait linked with curiosity, creativity, and a preference for variety and novelty, was associated with the opposite pattern: reduced thickness and an increase in area and folding in some prefrontal cortices.

Brains imaged as part of the Human Connectome Project all belonged to healthy individuals 22-36 years old with no history of neuro-psychiatric or other major medical problems. The relation between brain structure and personality traits in young and healthy people can change as people age and provide a reference frame for better understanding the brain structures in conditions such as autism, depression, or Alzheimer’s disease.

“Linking how brain structure is related to basic personality traits is a crucial step to improving our understanding of the link between the brain morphology and particular mood, cognitive or behavioral disorders,” Passamonti said. “We also need to have a better understanding of the relation between brain structure and function in healthy people to figure out what is different in people with neurological and psychiatric disorders.”

{Rat-grown mouse pancreases help reverse diabetes in mice, say researchers at Stanford, University of Tokyo.}

Mouse pancreases grown in rats generate functional, insulin-producing cells that can reverse diabetes when transplanted into mice with the disease, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Tokyo.

The recipient animals required only days of immunosuppressive therapy to prevent rejection of the genetically matched rather than lifelong treatment.

The success of the interspecies transplantation suggests that a similar technique could one day be used to generate matched, transplantable human organs in large animals like pigs or sheep.

To conduct the work, the researchers implanted mouse pluripotent stem cells, which can become any cell in the body, into early rat embryos. The rats had been genetically engineered to be unable to develop their own pancreas and were thus forced to rely on the mouse cells for the development of the organ.

Once the rats were born and grown, the researchers transplanted the insulin-producing cells, which cluster together in groups called islets, from the rat-grown pancreases into mice genetically matched to the stem cells that formed the pancreas. These mice had been given a drug to cause them to develop diabetes.

“We found that the diabetic mice were able to normalize their blood glucose levels for over a year after the transplantation of as few as 100 of these islets,” said Hiromitsu Nakauchi, MD, PhD, a professor of genetics at Stanford. “Furthermore, the recipient animals only needed treatment with immunosuppressive drugs for five days after transplantation, rather than the ongoing immunosuppression that would be needed for unmatched organs.”

Nakauchi, who is a member of Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, is the senior author of a paper describing the findings, which will be published online Jan. 25 in Nature. Tomoyuki Yamaguchi, PhD, an associate professor of stem cell therapy, and researcher Hideyuki Sato, both from the University of Tokyo, share lead authorship of the paper.

Organs in short supply

About 76,000 people in the United States are currently waiting for an organ transplant, but organs are in short supply. Generating genetically matched human organs in large animals could relieve the shortage and release transplant recipients from the need for lifelong immunosuppression, the researchers say.

People suffering from diabetes could also benefit from this approach. Diabetes is a life-threating metabolic disease in which a person or animal is unable to either make or respond appropriately to insulin, which is a hormone that allows the body to regulate its blood sugar levels in response to meals or fasting. The disease affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide and is increasing in prevalence. The transplantation of functional islets from healthy pancreases has been shown to be a potentially viable option to treat diabetes in humans, as long as rejection can be avoided.

The researchers’ current findings come on the heels of a previous study in which they grew rat pancreases in mice. Although the organs appeared functional, they were the size of a normal mouse pancreas rather than a larger rat pancreas. As a result, there were not enough functional islets in the smaller organs to successfully reverse diabetes in rats.

Mouse pancreases grown in rats

In the current study, the researchers swapped the animals’ roles, growing mouse pancreases in rats engineered to lack the organ. The pancreases were able to successfully regulate the rats’ blood sugar levels, indicating they were functioning normally. Rejection of the mouse pancreases by the rats’ immune systems was uncommon because the mouse cells were injected into the rat embryo prior to the development of immune tolerance, which is a period during development when the immune system is trained to recognize its own tissues as “self.” Most of these mouse-derived organs grew to the size expected for a rat pancreas, rendering enough individual islets for transplantation.

Next, the researchers transplanted 100 islets from the rat-grown pancreases back into mice with diabetes. Subsequently, these mice were able to successfully control their blood sugar levels for over 370 days, the researchers found.

Because the transplanted islets contained some contaminating rat cells, the researchers treated each recipient mouse with immunosuppressive drugs for five days after transplant. After this time, however, the immunosuppression was stopped.

After about 10 months, the researchers removed the islets from a subset of the mice for inspection.

“We examined them closely for the presence of any rat cells, but we found that the mouse’s immune system had eliminated them,” said Nakauchi. “This is very promising for our hope to transplant human organs grown in animals because it suggests that any contaminating animal cells could be eliminated by the patient’s immune system after transplant.”?

Importantly, the researchers also did not see any signs of tumor formation or other abnormalities caused by the pluripotent mouse stem cells that formed the islets. Tumor formation is often a concern when pluripotent stem cells are used in an animal due to the cells’ remarkable developmental plasticity. The researchers believe the lack of any signs of cancer is likely due to the fact that the mouse pluripotent stem cells were guided to generate a pancreas within the developing rat embryo, rather than coaxed to develop into islet cells in the laboratory. The researchers are working on similar animal-to-animal experiments to generate kidneys, livers and lungs.

Although the findings provide proof-of-principle for future work, much research remains to be done. Ethical considerations are also important when human stem cells are transplanted into animal embryos, the researchers acknowledge.

{Utilizing the most rigorous testing methods to date, researchers from North Carolina State University have isolated additional collagen peptides from an 80-million-year-old Brachylophosaurus. The work lends further support to the idea that organic molecules can persist in specimens tens of millions of years longer than originally believed and has implications for our ability to study the fossil record on the molecular level.}

Elena Schroeter, NC State postdoctoral researcher, and Mary Schweitzer, professor of biological sciences with a joint appointment at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, wanted to confirm earlier findings of original dinosaur collagen first reported in 2009 from Brachylophosaurus canadensis, a type of hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, that roamed what is now Montana around 80 million years ago.

“Mass spectrometry technology and protein databases have improved since the first findings were published, and we wanted to not only address questions concerning the original findings, but also demonstrate that it is possible to repeatedly obtain informative peptide sequences from ancient fossils,” Schroeter says.

Collagen is a protein and peptides are the building blocks of proteins. Recovering peptides allows researchers to determine evolutionary relationships between dinosaurs and modern animals, as well as investigate other questions, such as which characteristics of collagen protein allow it to preserve over geological time (or millions of years).

“We collected B. canadensis with molecular investigation in mind,” Schweitzer says. “We left a full meter of sediment around the fossil, used no glues or preservatives, and only exposed the bone in a clean, or aseptic, environment. The mass spectrometer that we used was cleared of contaminants prior to running the sample as well.”

The sample material came from the specimen’s femur, or thigh bone. Using mass spectrometry, the team recovered eight peptide sequences of collagen I, including two that are identical to those recovered in 2009, and six that are new. The sequences show that the collagen I in B. canadensis has similarities with collagen I in both crocodylians and birds, a result we would expect for a hadrosaur, based on predictions made from previous skeletal studies.

“We are confident that the results we obtained are not contamination and that this collagen is original to the specimen,” Schroeter says. “Not only did we replicate part of the 2009 results, thanks to improved methods and technology we did it with a smaller sample and over a shorter period of time.”

“Our purpose here is to build a solid scientific foundation for other scientists to use to ask larger questions of the fossil record,” Schweitzer adds. “We’ve shown that it is possible for these molecules to preserve. Now, we can ask questions that go beyond dinosaur characteristics. For example, other researchers in other disciplines may find that asking why they preserve is important.”

{An international team including researchers at the university of Edinburgh and Antoine Wystrach of the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (CNRS/Université Toulouse III — Paul Sabatier) has shown that ants can get their bearings whatever the orientation of their body. Their brains may be smaller than the head of a pin, but ants are excellent navigators that use celestial and terrestrial cues to memorize their paths. To do so, they use several regions of the brain simultaneously, proving once again that the brain of insects is more complex than thought. The researchers’ findings were published in Current Biology on January 19, 2017.}

Until now, ethological research suggested that ants memorized the scenery perceived along their route as it is projected on their multifaceted retinas — thus using a body-centered, or egocentric, frame of reference. By this hypothesis, to recognize memorized surroundings and follow a path formerly traveled, ants would need to orient their bodies in the same way each time. But they sometimes need to walk backwards as well, and this doesn’t prevent them from finding their way back to their nest. Could it be that ants can recognize a route when facing the opposite direction? Are they able to create a visual model of their environment that is independent of their body orientation?

To answer these questions, the researchers studied Cataglyphis velox, an Andalusian desert ant known for its solo navigation ability. First they let the insects familiarize themselves with a route that included a 90° turn. After a day of training, ants that received a cookie crumb light enough to carry while walking forward handled the turn without the slightest difficulty. However, those given large cookie crumbs had to move backward, and unlike the others, they maintained their bearing instead of turning.

They also exhibited unexpected behavior: After walking backward a bit, they would occasionally drop their crumb, turn around, observe the scenery while pointing their bodies in the right direction, return to the crumb, and resume towing it backward — but this time in the correct direction. For these ants, body alignment thus seems necessary for recognition of scenery perceived by their retinas, but they are then able to memorize the new bearing and follow it backward. This behavior also shows that they can recall the existence of the dropped cookie crumb, and its location, in order to return to it after updating their bearing. These observations imply that at least 3 kinds of memory are working in unison: the visual memory of the route, the memory of the new direction to follow, and the memory of the crumb to retrieve.

Through another experiment using a mirror to reflect the sun1, the team demonstrated that the ants used celestial cues to maintain their bearing while walking backwards. Furthermore, ants were able to move in straight paths, whether walking forward, backward, or sideways. Once a bearing is memorized, they stay on it no matter how their bodies are oriented. Together these observations suggest that ants register direction using an external — or allocentric — frame of reference.

These new findings show that the ants’ spatial orientation relies on multiple mental representations and memories woven together through a flow of information between several areas of their brain. This offers a whole new perspective on the world of insects, which is much more complex than previously believed.

1 This is a variation of an experiment performed over 100 years ago by Félix Santschi, who used mirrors to change ants’ perception of the sun’s location.

{The first molecular study of an organism able to survive intracellular freezing (freezing within its cells) is published this week by British Antarctic Survey (BAS), in collaboration with researchers from the University of Otago, New Zealand. The paper represents a milestone in scientists’ understanding of an extraordinary adaptation.}

The tiny Antarctic nematode, more commonly known as a round worm, (Panagrolaimus sp. DAW1) was cultured from a coastal Antarctic penguin rookery at McMurdo Sound, and is the best-documented organism able to survive the disruptions brought about by total freezing. The nematode is also able to undergo a form of freeze avoidance by eliminating all of its water content, called cryoprotective dehydration. However, it is the ability to survive intracellular freezing which makes this organism really stand out.

Exploring gene expression patterns, the researchers were able to show how molecularly active the nematodes are while in a frozen state, highlighting certain key genes enabling them to endure such an extreme physical state.

This is the first study of its kind, shedding light on a possibly rare adaptation, which could lead to new applications.