Tardigrades are microscopic eight-legged animals often referred to as “water bears.” The tiny animals are known for their extreme survival skills.
University of Wyoming researcher Thomas Boothby said tardigrades can survive several environmental conditions that are usually incompatible with life.
“Tardigrades have been frozen down to a degree above absolute zero; that's the temperature at which all molecular motion stops,” said Boothby. “You can also heat some tardigrades up well past the boiling point of water.”
These “water bears” can also go days or weeks with little to no oxygen and survive being dried out and losing almost all of the water in their body and cells.
Boothby explained tardigrades can even survive thousands of times as much radiation as humans.
“They're actually the only animal we know of that can survive in the vacuum of outer space,” said Boothby. “They've been sent into outer space out in the vacuum exposed to cosmic radiation, and when they were recovered back on Earth, they seemingly didn’t care.”
In the lab, Boothby looks at how tardigrades survive these conditions. He said the research team exposes the tiny animals to different stresses so they can study how tardigrade’s genes respond.
“Using some sort of more sophisticated methods like next generation sequencing, [we] look at which genes are being turned on and off in the tardigrades when they're stressed,” said Boothby.
This allows the researchers to understand what genes the tardigrades are using to survive the extreme condition. Boothby said this information allows the team to study a lot of different applications.
“We have a whole bunch of different approaches and techniques that we use, including using biochemistry to study their proteins and the products that they make,” said Boothby.
Many vaccines are made of proteins or nucleic acids. Boothby explained that understanding how tardigrades protect their proteins could be used to improve vaccines.
“If tardigrades have come up with these tricks to stabilize those biological components during extreme stress, our thought is that we can apply those same tricks to vaccines or pharmaceuticals,” said Boothby.
In theory, this research could make it possible for vaccines to no longer require being stored at cooler temperatures allowing for medications to be more easily accessible to developing parts of the world.
“That would open up so many new avenues for getting medicine to people in remote or developing parts of the world where you may not have access to stable electricity, refrigerators or freezers, or other means of keeping pharmaceutical stabilized,” said Boothby.
Trials gathering preliminary data are ongoing at the University of Wyoming. Boothby says the data from his work could be used for future FDA trials of new vaccines.
