2023-08-09 08:18:20
Electronic images and graphic presentations of Siberian worms. Press service
Genetic analysis of these worms shows that they belong to a previously unknown species.
If they might talk, these verses would have a lot to tell us. And for good reason: following having remained frozen for more than 46,000 years prisoners in the Siberian permafrost, they are still alive! Discovered by Russian scientists, these frozen nematodes were brought back to Moscow in 2018 to be reheated in Petri dishes at 20°C in the presence of agar-agar (a gelling agent extracted from algae, and bacteria E. coli (which served them as a meal). The tiny longworms of a few tenths of a millimeter then came back to life and have since reproduced over a hundred generations, resuming the course of their evolution as if nothing had happened.
More recently, a team of molecular biologists from the Max Planck Institute in Dresden in Germany was able to analyze them, publishing their results in late July in the journal Plos Genetics. According to the genetic profile of these animals, it would be a new species, which the researchers named
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