Thank you God for most of this incredible
Day: for green trees jumping
And a real blue dream of the sky; And for everything
what is natural that is infinite which is yes
American poet EE Cummings wrote this, apparently on Easter Sunday. He continues: “(I died, I’m again alive today, and it’s the anniversary of the sun; it’s the anniversary of life and love and wings.”
Combining the Renaissance with cycles in nature is not only a Christian or even religious thing. In temperate climates, in particular, every year, life that seems to die in autumn is resurrected in the spring. Even where the trees do not drop their leaves and the earth does not sleep under snow blanket, subtle changes can indicate a slowdown, a retreat, a feeling of animation in suspension. And now, in the spring, while SAP begins to flow, the buds begin to form and the shoots begin to germinate, life is risen. Animals emerge from hibernationLike Sleeping Beauty Woken from his 100 -year -old sleep similar to a death.
But some animals, and some other organisms, push the analogy a little further: apparently dead, they seem, it seems, come back to life.
Take the Tardigrade strangely to the hug air – like a cross between a tank and a teddy bear, and renowned for its indestructibility. Under extreme conditions, the Tardigrades can engage in cryptobiosis, a process in which they can become completely dehydrated and withdraw on a small ball called “tun”.
“The Tardigrades form tuns by contracting their muscles and simultaneously expeling water, which leads to a decrease in global volume,” said Derrick Kolling, president of the Department of Chemistry at Marshall University and head of his Kolling laboratory focused on Tardigrade.
The late would then be in “Tun’s state”. So they can stay for weeks before rekindling in more favorable conditions. It has been shown that certain species resuscitate fairly well (that is to say a substantial proportion of the individuals studied have survived) when they are rehydrated After more than seven months of cryptobiosis. And After two weeks of exposure to the emptiness of the space in weak orbit While in their drying state, Tardigrades returned “without ambiguity” (although after two years of this treatment, which also implies exposure to cosmic radiation, there was no resurrection). In another study, a kind of late revived After 20 years like a small dried ball.
“A criterion for something to be considered alive is metabolic activity,” noted Kolling, “and even in the extreme case of a complete break in metabolism, the Tardigrades always have a network of enzymes which can catabolize and anabolize – in this situation, I would consider them alive.
Continue to breathe …
… or not. Naked taupe rats are unique mammals in many ways. They have a complex social life, for example. They are eusocial, a description applied to animals – including bees, wasps, some other insects, certain shrimps that slam and these strange mammals – which have a complex social organization involving overlap of generations, high cooperative of the castes of young and non -reproductive workers. Their blood temperature fluctuates with room temperature, a rare line among the mammals they share with laziness.
Perhaps the most amazing, they are able – apparently – to die for a while when the ambient oxygen levels are extremely low or completely absent. It is true: in the tunnels in which naked taupe rats spend their lives, humidity levels can approach 100% and carbon dioxide accumulates thanks to dozens of wrinkled guys exhaling in the already very low oxygen environment. So, the naked bare rats are chronically deprived oxygen, but in the laboratory, the researchers confirmed that they could survive for a little time without any oxygen.
“Of nature, the naked mound rats are not exposed to anoxic (0% oxygen) (conditions), but when they were exposed to it in the laboratory, they survived for 18 minutes, which is in itself very impressive! At the living room. Currently researcher at the Brabraham Institute in Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, where she studies metabolic adaptations and the advantages of aging, Hadj-Moussa did his doctorate work to the extreme of metabolic adaptations focused on Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where
The reduction in the metabolic rate and the slowdown in the heart is an adaptation that naked mole rats share with most of the resurrected animals. But they also have a unique adaptation: the transition from their energy source from glucose to fructose.
“This is a strange adaptation but allows them to perform an anaerobic glycolysis,” said Hadj-Moussa. This means that during these low oxygen periods, they are able to generate energy from fructose without having to use rare oxygen to do so, because the generation of energy in the usual way, from glucose, would need. “They activate the neuroprotective and cardio protection mechanisms to limit damage.”
Then, when it is time of resurrection, Hadj-Moussa explained: “they” revived “by reversing what they did to depress their metabolism, return to the metabolism of glucose, while raising levels of antioxidants.”
Cool down
As with the world that freezes in winter and then goes back to life, the resurrection often involves cold. Among these is the wooden frog, a Canadian amphibian who freezes solid for eight months of the year.
“One of the main protective adaptations that the frogs have is their ability to simultaneously dehydrate their cells while pumping them full of glucose to prevent and minimize the formation of ice crystals inside cells, which is much more dangerous than freezing their body water in their extracellular spaces,” said Had-Moussa, who studied the living room. Each glucose molecule, she explained, surrounds himself with water molecules. Glucose prevents water from forming ice crystals when reducing cells, lowering the required temperature to it. And since the cells were also dehydrated, there is less water inside. About 70% of body water appears in wooden frogs is frozen outside their cells, in these “safe” extracellular spaces: inside the abdomen and in the leaves between their skin and muscles.
The first ice crystal that forms on the skin of the wooden frog triggers a cascade of chemical signals which “prepares the frog to undergo tolerance for frost and metabolic depression. This cascade leads the liver to produce massive quantities of glucose, (adjusting) Hadj-Moussa said.
A few years after also working on the wooden frog in Ottawa, another former laboratory former, Rasha al-Attar, is now working on Harvard Medical SchooL And the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Engineering in Medicine & Surgery, where it is inspired by nature to develop cryoconservations techniques for experimental models such as zebra fish, or to preserve organs such as human hearts.
The mechanisms that animals use to hibernate or slow down their metabolism in unfavorable seasonal conditions are similar to those used by resurrected creatures, which are a little more extreme on this subject. As Al-Attar and his M.SC. Supervisor, Ken Storey, written in an article from 2020“Although there are many forms of depression of metabolic rate, the underlying theory remains the same … The non-critical and harmful cellular and or harmful to the energy processes … are considerably reduced and the finite quantity of available energy reserves is allocated to the promotion of pro-survival processes” such as the operation of the self-reflection of the wood frog.
Little death
Sustainable extreme conditions are one thing. Then there is prosperity in them. When you can do it, you are called an end. The ends form another group of resurrectors. Many are bacteria or other microbes. Luis Andrés Yarzábal, microbiologist Universidad Católica de Cuenca In Ecuador, described the surprising discoveries of Russian scientists studying ice nuclei extracted from virgin glaciers in Antarctica in the 1980s.
“When they started to look at them under a microscope, they discovered a lot of microbes. Many were dead, of course, but others were alive and reactivated very quickly. Now we call this” resurrection “reactivation process, and this word is used at the end they reactivate,” Yarzábal in living room told. “In fact, this is what we (as scientists) do to preserve our bacterial strains, we gell them, in our ultra freezers at less than 80 degrees. It is therefore not surprising that microorganisms can remain not only alive, but viable, which means that they can start to divide.”
Organizations that can survive in this suspension, or anabiotic, in the state, explained Yarzábal, include not only extreme bacteria but also viruses, fungi, protozoa and microscopic animals called nematodes. The salts dissolved in water guarantee that a very small amount of water remain in the liquid state in the interface between the ice crystals. Microorganisms can be moved to this small space, where they avoid being injured by ice crystals and remain although their metabolic rate remains almost imperceptibly low, they therefore spends practically no energy in the functions of life, rather while waiting for their time until the conditions improve.
For EE Cummings, like previous American transcendentalist poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, being careful was everything. And when the creations of nature perform acts magical enough to be described as a resurrection, there is so much wonder to take care. This period of the year invites us all, believers and atheists, to emerge from our own suspended animation or small covered balls, like Cummings writes at the end of this poem:
now the ears of my awakened ears and
Now the eyes of my eyes are open
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