Tardigrades : Natures' Survivor and Biomedical Pioneer

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Authors

Aniket Singh¹ , Poushali Roy¹ , Tamali Das¹ , Neelabh Datta¹

Conference / event: Modern Trends in Microbiology Chapter XX, October 2023 (Kolkata, India)

Poster summary: Meet tardigrades, the ultimate superheroes of the microscopic world! These tiny "water bears" can withstand extreme conditions like dehydration, freezing, and radiation. They achieve this by entering a death-like state called cryptobiosis, expelling water and curling up into a dehydrated tun. Scientists are fascinated by their radiation tolerance and stress-resistant genes, which have already been used to enhance human cells' resistance to radiation. The tardigrade genome holds promise for cancer research, genome integrity, and discovering new molecules for biomedical applications. Proteins like Dsup and CAHS are already showing potential for mitigating DNA damage and oxidative stress. Who knew these tiny creatures could have such a big impact on human medicine?

Keywords: Tardigrades, Biomedical application, Intrinsically disordered protein, Drug delivery

References

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Hesgrove, C., Boothby, T.C. (2020). The biology of tardigrade disordered proteins in extreme stress tolerance. Cell Commun Signal 18, 178. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12964-020-00670-2
Kasianchuk, N., Rzymski, P., & Kaczmarek, Ł. (2023). The biomedical potential of tardigrade proteins: A review. Biomedicine & pharmacotherapy = Biomedecine & pharmacotherapie, 158, 114063. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopha.2022.114063
Neves, R. C., Hvidepil, L. K. B., Sørensen-Hygum, T. L., Stuart, R. M., & Møbjerg, N. (2020). Thermotolerance experiments on active and desiccated states of Ramazzottius varieornatus emphasize that tardigrades are sensitive to high temperatures. Scientific reports, 10(1), 94

Additional information

Data availability statement: Data sharing not applicable to this poster as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Creative Commons license: Copyright © 2024 Singh et al. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.