Tiny skaters beneath the arctic ice rewrite the limits of life

 



But new research from Stanford, published Sept. 9 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed Arctic diatoms aren't immobile or entombed. They're not just surviving either - they're gliding into the record books.

"This is not 1980s-movie cryobiology. The diatoms are as active as we can imagine until temperatures drop all the way down to -15 C, which is super surprising," said Manu Prakash, associate professor of bioengineering in the Schools of Engineering and Medicine and senior author of the paper.

That temperature (5 F) is the lowest ever recorded for movement by a eukaryotic cell - the type of complex cells in plants, animals, fungi, and more, defined by having a nucleus inside a membrane.

"You can see the diatoms actually gliding, like they are skating on the ice," said lead author and Stanford postdoctoral scholar Qing Zhang, who collected the samples during an Arctic research expedition. She and her colleagues demonstrated not only motility at such low temperatures, but also that their gliding - or skating - relies on a combination of mucus and molecular motors.

Navigating a bustling 'berg

The diatoms featured in this research resulted from a 45-day Arctic expedition in the Chukchi Sea aboard the research vessel Sikuliaq, which is owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Researchers from the Prakash Lab and the lab of Kevin Arrigo, professor of Earth system science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, collected ice cores from 12 stations throughout the summer of 2023. Using a range of on-ship microscopes that the Prakash Lab has been developing for years, the team was able to image inside ice and document the secret lives of these incredible arctic diatoms.

Back in the lab, the team extracted diatoms from the ice cores and recreated their environments in a petri dish containing a thin layer of frozen freshwater and a layer of very cold saltwater. When ice forms in the Arctic, it kicks out salt, leaving freshwater ice with small microfluidic channels in it - so the lab also made channels in their ice, using their own hair.

Even as they lowered the temperatures of a special sub-zero microscope below freezing, the diatoms slipped through the strand-sized highways. Further experiments, using gels seeded with fluorescent beads, tracked their movements like footprints in sand.

#ArcticLife
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#LifeUnderIce
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