After 46,000 years of hibernation under the frozen soil of Siberia, scientists succeeded in discovering a female roundworm and returned it to its normal activity, and even managed to stimulate it to reproduce.
According to the American University of Hawaii, the worm spent tens of thousands of years in a state known scientifically as “hibernation”, which is a “non-metabolic” state that the organism enters in response to difficult environmental conditions such as drought, freezing or lack of oxygen, during which all measurable vital processes stop, and thus stops reproduction and evolution, and when conditions return to normal, the organism can return to its state as it was before hibernation.
Scientists were able to restore the worm to its activity and ability to reproduce through a process called “parthenogenesis “, a term that refers to reproduction without fertilization.
In a study published Thursday in the scientific journal “Plus Genetics”, the researchers said, after sequencing the worm’s genome, that is, the complete sequence of its DNA, that it belongs to an “undescribed species.”
Biologist Holly Beck estimates that there are millions of species of roundworms living in diverse environments, such as ocean trenches, deserts and volcanic soils.
William Crowe, a nematode pathologist at the University of Florida who was not involved in the study, said the worm could belong to a species that went extinct roughly 50,000 years ago.
It is noteworthy that the fact that the worm survived for such a long period does not come as a shock to scientists, because they made previous discoveries that microorganisms, such as the worm studied, can stop their vital functions to survive even in the harshest conditions.