Why Scientists Are Stress Testing Tardigrades

[Narrator] Tardigrades are microscopic animals

so adaptable,

they can be found in extreme environments,

even Antarctica and volcanic vents, deep in the ocean.

Tardigrades are like a extremely charismatic organism

to work with.

They're cute.

They have little eye spots and eight little legs.

[Narrator] Many scientists like Dr. Thomas Boothby

have tested the toughness of these so-called

water bears with creative experiments.

[gunshot]

They've been shot out of a gun frozen,

nearly to absolute zero

and exposed to the vacuum of space for 10 days.

[epic trumpet music]

[Dr. Boothby] So we know that they're very tough,

but we don't really know how they're doing that.

[Narrator] To find out how

Boothby sent water bears up to the

International Space Station

and also down into the ocean

with his aquanaut colleague, Dr. Hunter Hines.

Scientists are really looking at

how we can stress out tardigrades and

what we might learn from their adaptations.

[Narrator] Let's get a close up look at two new

tardigrade experiments,

and what we hope to learn from them.

[enchanted orchestral music]

[Dr. Hines] So here we have a freshwater tardigrade,

and this one's about 200 microns in length.

A thousand microns are in a millimeter.

Tardigrades are really good,

you know, microbial predators.

That green coloration is actually

ingested algae that's within it.

[Dr. Boothby] Dr. Hines is an avid scuba diver.

He goes on these really cool aquanaut missions

where he took tardigrades down into the ocean

and left them there for extended periods of time

at increased pressure.

I think it will be really,

really cool to compare the data sets that we get from the

aquanaut mission to the space flight mission,

and sort of see how these animals are able to cope with

disparate extremes of environments.

So Dr. Boothby has a fabulous molecular lab set up.

He was able to send me these tardigrades,

the exact same batch from the,

the space experiments.

In the mail basically over-nighting them to me,

they come in these small tubes,

they're kept cool as they ship across the country.

And then we're able to just pull them out,

get them back to ambient temperature.

And the Tardigrades are fine with that.

[Narrator] To conduct the pressure test Dr. Hines

packs up his water bears and gear and dry boxes

and triple bags them for the journey

to the Jewel's Underwater Lodge,

which is only accessible by scuba diving

down into a salt water lagoon.

[Dr. Hines] So basically we take it down

to just about 30 feet and the habitat has a moon pool

basically it has an opening at the very bottom underneath

the habitat,

which is just kept open by the pressure.

So we're breathing compressed air down here at 30 feet.

So it's actually like a 24 hour long scuba dive.

And you can feel the effects of pressure.

You feel it a little bit in your head.

You definitely feel it a little bit in your lungs,

that structure about 14 pounds of pressure pushing down on

you as you take each breath.

And then of course,

it's affecting the tardigrades,

it's affecting me,

it's affecting the bag of chips.

As you can see these chip bags didn't do so well as the air

inside them presses down kind of the opposite of what

happens on an airplane when they expand.

[Narrator] Air is pumped in from the surface

and the habitat,

which dates back to the early 1970s is equipped the sensors

that keeps tabs on the gas levels in space.

[Dr. Hines] Once you saturated,

you can stay down there as long as you'd like.

[Narrator] Once Dr. Hines settles in,

his 24 hour experiment begins.

[Dr. Hines] So the hypothesis was that tardigrades

would be effected by the pressure,

and that would be reflected in the molecular data.

I took down a portable microscope,

which can go up to a thousand times magnification.

So the cool thing of being here and is under sea habitats,

we can actually observe these tardigrades live at pressure.

At one hour, they're fine.

But now after about 12 hours,

they're really showing some signs of

the spirometric pressure affecting them.

They're a lot more sluggish.

They're kind of compressing a little bit,

and that's all due to this added stress of the pressure.

So it'd be really interesting

to get them back to Dr. Boothby's lab

and see exactly what's happening to them

at a genetic level.

[Narrator] But to determine what exact genes

are responding to the high pressure environment,

Dr. Hines will somehow have to provide Dr. Boothby

back at the lab,

with a snapshot of the underlying

molecular profile of the water bears every hour.

But how?

We put a chemical preservative on them,

which basically stabilizes a certain type of molecule

called RNA.

Cells take DNA and transcribe it into RNA.

If we look at what RNA is being made,

we can get an idea of which genes in our DNA are active.

So once the experiment was completed

and we cleaned all our gear up,

we were able to pack up these different tubes,

very carefully,

and we just sent them in the mail back to Dr. Boothby's lab.

[Narrator] From aquanauts we turn to astronauts,

254 miles above earth who performed a similar experiment,

also under the direction of Dr. Boothby.

[Dr. Boothby] So in space,

there's two main stressors that we know of.

One is being in micro gravity.

The other is once you leave Earth's atmosphere,

you're exposed to a lot more radiation.

The tardigrades are exposed to the exact same conditions

that astronauts are.

We prepared our animals in just these sort of small tubes.

And from the Kennedy space center,

they went up on a space X rocket to the space station.

It was a really interesting process

getting to work with the astronauts,

but at every step in the process,

we could communicate with them,

see what they were doing.

They could ask us questions.

What you have here are some photos

of a French astronaut Tomas.

Essentially, he's got his hands in a glove box

to help contain any sort of biological material

that might escape.

Tomas did a really amazing job

taking care of our little water bears up there for us.

[Narrator] Similar to the deep sea experiment,

the role of the astronauts was to provide Dr. Boothby

with a freeze frame image of which specific DNA was

active at one week,

and then at 61 days

using the same chemical preservative.

Once put this chemical preservative on the animals.

they're no longer alive,

that will kill them,

but it will preserve their RNA

as it was at that exact moment.

Indefinitely.

The seven day samples are

sort of the founding generation,

that came from earth.

The 61 day samples

are tardigrades that were born in space

and have never been on earth before.

Are there differences in genes

from terrestrial tardigrades

here on earth versus in space?

If we can understand

how the tardigrades are surviving in

these conditions over multiple generations,

maybe we can develop technology that would allow humans to

have a more safe,

prolonged presence in space.

If we want to go to Mars, for example,

or if we want to set up a permanent moon base,

these are sort of stresses that

people are going to need to deal with.

[Narrator] Once this experiment concluded,

the preserved tardigrades hitched a ride back to earth,

on the latest space X rocket,

making a supply run to the ISS.

[Dr. Boothby] They're now in our freezer in our lab,

and we're working to extract the RNA.

We'll be taking a look at what RNA is present

and what genes were activated,

under these different stressful conditions.

[Narrator] Although the data from these two experiments

won't be ready for analysis for several months,

Dr. Boothby's previous experiments on tardigrades

have yielded some potential real-world applications.

One of the exciting things that we found is,

that tardigrades,

they have unique genes that only tardigrades have.

The proteins that are made from these tardigrade genes,

they're actually very amorphous.

They kind of are constantly changing their shape.

So they're what we call intrinsically disordered proteins.

[Narrator] Some of these mutable,

unbreakable tardigrade proteins,

help keep the animals alive

in a state of suspended animation,

even when 99% of the water in their bodies dries up.

Tardigrades aren't the only organisms that can do this,

look at plant seeds for example,

that's basically the embryo of a plant

that can persist in a dry state.

But what we found is

that if we take these proteins

and put them into other systems,

like bacteria or yeast,

we can make those organisms more desiccation tolerant.

They're able to stabilize biological material

in a dry state.

We can try and make, let's say crop plants,

more tolerant to drought,

the Pfizer vaccine for COVID,

needs to be stored at negative 80 degrees.

Imagine if you could mix it with these tardigrade proteins,

stabilize it in a dry state

and not have to store it

under these really stringent conditions.

The application we're working on right now

is the stabilization of human blood in a dry state.

Having dried powdered blood

that you can add liquid back to

and reconstitute it

and use it as needed,

would be a sort of huge boon to health pursuits.

[Narrator] Powdered blood that can be

shipped and stored without refrigeration?

Is that possible?

[Dr. Boothby] We're working on this now.

We've seen some really promising results,

with certain blood cell types.

Very excited to see what comes out of this in the future.

If this experiment turns out

to show some kind of novel adaptations and

perhaps some new avenues to pursue for different,

different kind of benefits to society,

I think tardigrades will continue to be tested

in these extremes.

[Narrator] So the Hardy tardigrade,

the mighty moss piglet,

continues to endure and teach us valuable lessons

about how they adapt to whatever the earth

and the cosmos throws at them.

[peaceful piano music]