Using Tardigrades and Other Animals to Investigate Adaptations to Extreme Stresses

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The main scientific goal of this project is to discover how certain living organisms can survive some remarkably extreme conditions. Tardigrades are a group of microscopic, eight-legged animals that can survive being dried out, exposed to extreme levels of radiation, or exposed to the vacuum of space. Because some essential biological molecules are damaged by such conditions, to survive and recover from these extreme conditions tardigrades must harbor exceptional protective mechanisms, which are only partially understood and will be investigated in this project. Identifying such mechanisms can suggest possible long-term routes to protecting other fragile biological materials including important biomedical products that have very short shelf lives. Several graduate and undergraduate students and a post-doctoral fellow will be involved in the research. The project will also leverage researchers' abilities with microscopic organisms and microscopes in a program to build low cost, tablet-based microscopes for elementary schools in high-poverty regions. Workshops will be held to train teachers how to build these microscopes and develop lesson plans to incorporate microscope use in their classrooms, and the impacts of this program will be assessed.Tardigrades are among the few animal groups, including certain nematodes, arthropods, and rotifers, that can survive desiccation with loss of nearly all intracellular water. Furthermore, tardigrades tolerate other stresses that some of these other groups do not survive. The goals of this project are to identify new protectants made by tardigrades, understand how some strong protectants work in living organisms, and begin to understand the evolutionary origins of animal protectants. Genetic and molecular studies will be used to identify molecules that contribute to tolerance to desiccation, freezing, oxidative stress, and ionizing radiation, and the mechanisms by which some strong protectants work will be studied. Results from this research have the potential to identify protectant molecules that may be useful for biomedical purposes. The project will also place inexpensive microscopes in elementary schools in high-poverty regions of North Carolina and in other states. In pilot efforts, more than 500 low-cost microscopes have been built, mostly for North Carolina public elementary schools, in teacher workshops held in schools, museums, and at an annual teachers’ conference. This project builds on lessons learned in the pilot efforts, expanding the project by running additional workshops, by training other scientists to run similar workshops in other parts of the country, and by collaboratively assessing key outcomes of the workshops. In addition, the project involves training for one post-doctoral fellow, graduate students, and undergraduate summer researchers, thereby contributing to STEM career development.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.