Scientific Adventures: Hybrid water bears

Science news this week was full of more out-of-this-world discoveries, including a new object in our solar system and new information about a tiny immortal creature.

Immortal creature

Tardigrades are a lovable microscopic species that are best known for being able to live when exposed to the inhospitable environment of outer space.

But new research conducted on the seemingly un-killable creatures, also known as water bears, is giving scientists even more to scratch their heads at after a team of researchers from the University of North Carolina decided to perform a set of genomic sequencing tests.

After sequencing the DNA from a single species, scientists found that around 6,000 genes making up about 1/6 of the DNA sequence were considered foreign. This means the genes came from different animals, doubling the previous record for foreign DNA in a species.

DNA swapping is nothing new, almost every creature has some DNA from another, but what astounded scientists was the sheer amount of genes from other species. It was mostly from bacteria, but sequences from fungi and plants were also found.

The scientists theorize that due to the nature of the water bears ability to come back to life after freezing, it creates a “leaky” environment within the cell that allows for chunks of DNA from other creatures to insert itself in the temporarily damaged DNA strand. When the water bears’ DNA repair mechanisms start working, they stitch the foreign DNA into the strand, and the creature then has a new hybridized strand.

Researchers noticed that gene sequences from bacteria living in extreme conditions were also present in the sampled water bear, in some cases having completely replaced original genetic mechanisms.

Scientist now hope to begin sequencing more species, as there over 1100 currently known, to see if this is common across all tardigrades or unique to the Hypsibius dujardini alone.

New planet discovered

A team of D.C. astronomers using a Japanese telescope in Hawaii have given everyone a new object to start looking for, one three times farther than the dwarf planet Pluto.

The suspected planet, dubbed V774104, sits at 103 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun and is situated at the edge of the solar systems Kuiper’s Belt, a region of space full of comets from the solar systems creation 4.5 billion years ago.

The previous most distant object from the Sun was the dwarf planet Eris, about the same size as Pluto sitting 96 AU, with an AU measuring the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Team astronomer Scott Sheppard announced V774104 at the American Astronomical Society’s 47th annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences. The team made the discovery by pointing their telescope just along the solar systems plane of axis, looking for objects in line with other planets.

During the announcement Sheppard said the team now hoped to track the suspected planets orbit to determine if it moves within the Kuiper’s Belt about 30 to 50 AU away or if it travels towards the Oort Cloud, a shelling of primordial rock and ice 2,000 to 50,000 AU away. The team also stated they were confident of discovering more objects, and that it was only a matter of time before they find something.