Asexuality has major theoretical advantages over sexual reproduction. An important evolutionary puzzle, therefore, is why exclusively asexual metazoan lineages rarely endure. The Red Queen hypothesis posits that asexuality is rapidly extinguished by relentlessly coevolving parasites and pathogens. If so, any long-lasting asexual lineage must have unusual alternative mechanisms to deal with thes...

The Center for Biostabilization at UC Davis is attempting to stabilize mammalian cells in the dry state. We review here some of the lessons from nature that we have been applying to this enterprise, including the use of trehalose, a disaccharide found at high concentrations in many anhydrobiotic organisms, to stabilize biological structures, both in vitro and in vivo. Trehalose has useful prope...

Limno-terrestrial tardigrades are small invertebrates that are subjected to periodic drought of their micro-environment. They have evolved to cope with these unfavorable conditions by anhydrobiosis, an ametabolic state of low cellular water. During drying and rehydration, tardigrades go through drastic changes in cellular water content. By our transcriptome sequencing effort of the limno-terres...

The African chironomid Polypedilumvanderplanki Hinton, 1951 is the only chironomid able to withstand almost complete desiccation in an ametabolic state known as anhydrobiosis. The karyotypes of two allopatric populations of this anhydrobiotic chironomid, one from Nigeria and another from Malawi, were described according to the polytene giant chromosomes. The karyotype from the Nigerian populati...

Anhydrobiosis refers to a state of suspended animation in which some organisms enter when exposed extreme desiccation, ensuring them an outstanding tolerance several physical stresses due molecular and cellular adaptations. Metallothioneins (MTs) are short cysteine-rich metal-chelating proteins that work as protection element metal ion-rich conditions. Here we aimed investigate possible signatu...

Larvae of an anhydrobiotic insect, Polypedilum vanderplanki, accumulate very large amounts of trehalose as a compatible solute on desiccation, but the molecular mechanisms underlying this accumulation are unclear. We therefore isolated the genes coding for trehalose metabolism enzymes, i.e. trehalose-6-phosphate synthase (TPS) and trehalose-6-phosphate phosphatase (TPP) for the synthesis step, ...