2023-07-27 19:11:04
Published on July 27, 2023 at 9:11 p.m. Modified on July 27, 2023 at 9:22 p.m.
Preserving a living organism by immersing it in ice and seeing it come back to life thousands of years later. A fantasy that has long animated and still animates the human species. Far from our eyes, beings of barely a millimeter are naturally capable of this. These are small worms belonging to the nematode family, abundant roundworms under our feet. Dormant in Siberian permafrost for nearly 46,000 years, they were resurrected by scientists in Russia. Their DNA, analyzed in Germany, revealed that it was an unknown species, emerging from the past. This not trivial story is told in an article published this Thursday in the review PLOS Genetics.
It all starts in 2018, when researcher Anastasia Shatilovich from the Institute of Physico-Chemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science RAS in Russia manages to revive two frozen nematodes extracted from the permafrost – perpetually frozen soil – of Siberia. More precisely, the discovery of the worms was made in fossilized tunnels of arctic marmots, 40 meters deep. Radiocarbon dating of the plant material present in the permafrost indicated that it had not thawed for a period dating back between 45,839 and 47,769 years, thus belonging to the late Pleistocene.
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