In 2024 I’ve resolved to do my best not to belabor things that have already been said. Therefore, going forward, I will attempt to confine myself to original content. So, what can I talk about? Breaking news? Well, there was a major earthquake in Japan.
But there’s always a major earthquake in Japan. Hauling out terms like temblor and Richter scale and seismic this, that and the other or going on and on about aftershocks and tsunamis is hardly original. Pass!
Obviously, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are just grinding along in a predictably gruesome fashion. Nope.
Well, I could conceive of nothing less original than the ball-dropping ceremony in Times Square and its attendant gathering of aging and uninteresting entertainment celebrities. Chah!
So, no breaking news worth discussing.
How about tardigrades?
You know, water bears. Those barely visible invertebrates that can be exposed to the hard vacuum and near absolute zero of outer space, to hard radiation, or desiccated in a desert for years and even frozen in ice and boiled in geysers and still wake up decades later and resume feeding on moss or dandruff or whatever is available and seem completely unphased.
Finally, something interesting to talk about.
Ever since I first heard about these bizarre and strangely endearing little creatures, I’ve wondered whether there was something unique about their survival abilities. And it turns out there is.
As you know I’m no longer a big fan of tolerance. It’s bitten me in the butt too many times over the years. But apparently tolerance proteins are a very useful thing to have when you find yourself submerged in freezing liquid or exposed to outer space.
“Tardigrades are able to tolerate almost complete dehydration by entering a reversible ametabolic state called anhydrobiosis and resume their animation upon rehydration. Dehydrated tardigrades are exceptionally stable and withstand various physical extremes.”
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“In the present study, we first postulated the presence of tolerance proteins that form protective condensates via phase separation in a stress-dependent manner and searched for tardigrade proteins that reversibly form condensates upon dehydration-like stress.”
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CAHS proteins increased cell stiffness in a hyperosmotic stress-dependent manner and counteract the cell shrinkage caused by osmotic pressure, and even improved the survival against hyperosmotic stress.
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On the basis of these results, we propose that CAHS proteins are novel cytoskeleton-like proteins that form filamentous networks and undergo gel-transition in a stress-dependent manner to provide on-demand physical stabilization of cell integrity against deformative forces during dehydration and could contribute to the exceptional physical stability in a dehydrated state.
I heard about a Chinese study that inserted genes from a tardigrade into a human cell line that gave it protection from radiation associated DNA damage. It was posited that this would be a valuable addition to the creation of human super soldiers. Well duh! Anyone who has watched Captain America knows that tardigrade-style ability to tolerate the radiation from a tesseract plus the ability to be frozen for a century or so in the Arctic Ocean is very handy for a super soldier.
My takeaway from all this is that adding tardigrade tolerance proteins will allow humans to be placed in a long term reversible ametabolic state called anhydrobiosis from which they will be able to emerge after millennia in order to serve as my laborers once I emerge from long sleep in some far away galaxy. As their emperor I will be able to call on their immunity to radiation to have them wage nuclear war against my enemies the beetle men of Krrrrlll 3,
while I attend to more important concerns like my ongoing work on thorium doped decorative ceramics (a definitive study).