Safrey,
You mentioned the tardigrades: well.....welllllll.........
now we are talking. the missing link between the fly and the worm.
The Tardigrade:
Look at this: the egg and what it lies on, and much more about these tardigrades can be blown around by the wind, they are numerous in lichen and they love algae.
check this photo out.
www.flickr.com/photos/nebarnix/310159466/in/photostream/You can see the outline of the skin of the tardigrade.
It is translucent.
The egg lies on the DESICATED skin. The tardigrades can be frozen and brought back to life. They can withstand living without water for long periods of time, they can infect humans.
Think of it like a scabie, however it is a model being used in Evolutionary Biology.
Fits a niche where there wasn't one. My take on it.
I would say is the size of a scabie or spider mite.
Now, what got me about them is the use of them in Agriculture, in altering species, and that they are very hard to kill.
But look at this, and the TARDIGRADES since from dissected tardigrades, I betcha, can come alive in VACCINES. Tardigrades can almost self replicate from dessicated parts. That is probably why they are good to use agriculture, however, the dessicated parts would be going in our bodies, right? Would these vaccines be tardigrade free? or would the dessicated parts be reinstated within living tissue. Seem they use the sugar Trehelose from the tardigrade.mmmmmmmm
"Anhydrobiosis-inspired vaccine storage: Current vaccines spoil easily without refrigeration, and 50 percent fail to reach patients because of a break in the “cold chain.” The quest for thermally-stable storage led Bruce Rosner of Cambridge Biostability Ltd (UK) to study
anhydrobiosis, the process by which organisms like tardigrades and resurrection ferns are able to remain in a long-term desiccated state. These organisms replace the water in their cells with a protective sugar called trehelose. By coating vaccines with trehelose and suspending them in vials of inert liquid, Biostability was able to create multi-valent vaccines which remain stable for years, despite freezing or high temperatures. Since the liquid formulations are anhydrous, they are inherently bacteriostatic, eliminating the need for antiseptics. Cambridge Biostability has already stabilized vaccines for conjugate meningitis A, hepatitis B, and tetanus toxoid. They are now developing programs for measles, pentavalent childhood vaccines, heptavalent botulinum and anthrax vaccines."
from this link:
www.biomimicry.net/casestudies.htmThe charactistics of Tardigrades are very interesting: Click on link for picture:
bric.postech.ac.kr/science/97now/00_2now/000201a.html......"Candied Cells Have Longer Shelf Life
"You can buy them in any toy store: dried sea monkeys that spring to life in a dish of water. Now researchers have borrowed a chemical trick from these tiny animals to revive dried or frozen human cells. The technique could lead to off-the-shelf human cells and tissue for blood transfusions, skin grafts, and a variety of other medical treatments, two teams report in the February Nature Biotechnology.
Microbes called tardigrades can survive for decades without water.
CREDIT: JOHN CROWE
Organisms as diverse as sea monkeys (they are tiny shrimp, in fact), yeast, and microbes called tardigrades can survive decades without water. But cultured human cells quickly die unless they are coddled. To help human cells survive cold storage, explains biomedical engineer Mehmet Toner of Harvard Medical School in Boston, researchers coat them with protectants, freeze them slowly so damaging ice crystals don't form, and store them in expensive tanks cooled by liquid nitrogen.
To find a better way to keep cells on ice, Toner's team loaded cells with trehalose, a sugar that protects cells in some organisms from ice crystals and desiccation. Trehalose can take the place of water in the cell, forming a protective coat around enzymes, membranes, and DNA. Our bodies don't make trehalose, and it is too big to cross the cell membrane, so they snuck it into cells via a-hemolysin, a bacterial toxin that pokes holes in the membrane large enough to let the sugar in. Without trehalose, less than 1% of cells survived freezing; when laced with the sugar, 72% of the cells revived after thawing.
Trehalose also preserves human cells that are dried, reports a second team led by geneticist Fred Levine of the University of California, San Diego. The researchers engineered cells called fibroblasts to produce the bacterial enzymes that make trehalose. Normal cells die within 1 day after being dried out, but the altered cells were fine for up to 5 days without water.
It's "remarkable" that simply adding a sugar is enough to preserve both frozen and dried cells, says biochemist John Crowe of the University of California, Davis. The method might make it possible to store dried human tissue on a shelf indefinitely. "It's been a dream of a lot of people to do that for a long time," says Crowe.
--DAN FERBER
Okay have how these are used in different ways and the construction of them, most like synthetic.
The problem is that nature can only be biomimicked, nature as it is cannot be patented. But, now the genes, proteins, and parts of organisms are being cloned and patented to do what nature already does. How idiotic.
Sad, that Pharmaceutical companies invest so much in proteins or silacatein from diatoms and sponges, and trehelose from tardigrades. Surely one does not need to exploit nature to heal humans? Naw...........
more on the biomaterials from nature and the exploitation of them and the transgenics between the tardigrade, and nematode, a bit later.
If we can see what the tardigrade is capable of, we might be closer right along with the Pfiesteria piscicida.
The tardigrade has become a model, as the the drosophila, the c. elegans worm etc.
Skytroll