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Mechanisms of neuronal resilience and repair in tardigrades

Elucidate the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying neuronal resilience and repair in tardigrades during environmental stress conditions, including desiccation, freezing, and radiation, to understand how neural integrity is preserved and restored.

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Background

Tardigrades are famous for surviving extreme environments, yet the neural mechanisms enabling resilience and repair remain uncharacterized. The paper frames this as a key unexplored area.

Understanding these mechanisms could inform neuroprotection strategies and illuminate how memories or neural states persist across dormancy, with translational relevance to biomedicine.

References

The anatomical and functional mapping of the tardigrade nervous system is in its infancy: the exact number of neurons in any tardigrade life-history stage remains unknown, neuronal identities and types have not been established, their connectome has yet to be reconstructed, and the mechanisms underlying the animal's fascinating neurobiology, such as neuronal resilience and repair, remain unexplored (see Table 1 for current neuroanatomical knowledge).

— The tardigrade as an emerging model organism for systems neuroscience (2501.06606 - Lyons et al., 11 Jan 2025) in Introduction