Common aquatic animals show extreme resistance to...( CAMBRIDGE Mass. March 25 2008 -- Sci...)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 25, 2008 -- Scientists at Harvard University have found that a common class of freshwater invertebrate animals called bdelloid rotifers are extraordinarily resistant to ionizing radiation, surviving and continuing to reproduce after doses of gamma radiation much greater than that tolerated by any other animal species studied to date.

Because free radicals such as those generated by radiation have been implicated in inflammation, cancer, and aging in higher organisms, the findings -- published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Harvard's Matthew Meselson and graduate student Eugene Gladyshev -- could stimulate new lines of research into these medically important problems.

"Bdelloid rotifers are far more resistant to ionizing radiation than any of the hundreds of other animal species for which radiation resistance has been examined," says Meselson, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "They are able to recover and resume normal reproduction after receiving a dose of radiation that shatters their genomes, causing hundreds of DNA double-strand breaks which they are nevertheless able to repair."

Meselson and Gladyshev found that the bdelloid rotifers Adineta vaga and Philodina roseola remained reproductively viable after doses of radiation roughly five times greater than other classes of rotifers and other animals could endure.

Such radiation resistance appears not to be the result of any special protection of DNA itself against breakage, the researchers say, but instead reflects bdelloid rotifers' extraordinary ability to protect their DNA-repairing machinery from radiation damage.

Roughly a half-millimeter in size and commonly observed under microscopes in high-school biology classes, bdelloid rotifers are highly unusual in several regards: They appear to be exclusively asexual, have relatively few transp
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