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Regardless, Boothby and his colleagues seem to have pinpointed the genes that make the water bear’s life-saving proteins. “We went on to show that if you reduce expression of these genes in tardigrades, they can no longer survive desiccation very well,” Boothby says. “If you take those genes and put them into organisms like bacteria and yeast, which normally do not have these proteins, they actually become much more desiccation-tolerant.” The water bear’s secret ingredient can make other organisms up to 100 times hardier.
The mechanism of these intrinsically disordered proteins looks a lot like how the trehalose sugar protects animals like nematode worms from dessication. Like something out of a fairy tale or the very least an ‘80s movie, the protein turns the water bear into a frozen glass figurine, a process known as vitrification. Normally, dessication crystallizes living cells, shredding up proteins and DNA in the process. But with the gentler, smoother process of vitrification, the water bear can ride out the desiccation, only to reanimate once it hits water perhaps 30 years later.
