In the Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility from Fox (Alaska), scientists from the CRREL laboratory (Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory) identified 26 new species of microorganisms in ice cores around 38,000 years old, some dating back to the time of the Neanderthals. “Microbes are the best chemists”explains Robyn Barbato, microbiologist and head of the soil team at CRREL in an article in 404 Media.
Where other teams are already thawing 50,000-year-old viruses or multi-resistant bacteria for purely medical purposes, the American army is targeting very concrete applications: anti-frostbite creams for soldiers, new anti-freeze fluids, de-icing techniques for vehicles and equipment, even methods for stabilizing ice and allowing machines to cross thawed ground. “For the military, frostbite is a huge problem in extreme conditions in the Arctic”recalls Barbato, who also cites pens whose ink freezes and batteries which fail.
The work is funded by the “Ice Control for Cold Environments” (ICE… but not the same) program of DARPA, the American military innovation agency. The idea is to reproduce the survival mechanisms of these microbes which withstand negative temperatures over millennia. A study published last year concludes that these permafrost microorganisms exhibit a diversity of stress responses and adaptations “relevant for biotechnology”.
Billions of cells
Concretely, the teams extract samples in the tunnel, transport them to the laboratory in Hanover (New Hampshire), then awaken the bacteria there, which they cultivate and add to a biobank: the ICE COLD (for “Innovative, Collaborative, Exploratory Cold Regions Organism Library for Discovery in Biotechnology”, they are definitely very fans of acronyms). This collection brings together microorganisms from soil, snow and ice in the Arctic, Antarctic and high altitudes, and serves as a living database for the ICE program.
Not all of these bacteria have remained completely frozen: some spores seem to have been in stasis for as long as ice, other “younger” communities continue to reproduce very slowly, feeding on other bacteria and adapting over thousands of years. According to Barbato, a single gram of permafrost contains around ten million bacterial cells, “an immense biodiversity, frozen in time”.
If this research is driven by military needs, its impact goes well beyond the field of defense. New antifreezes or de-icing devices could also be of interest to transport or civil infrastructure, while new proteins, derived from these extremophilic microbes, could inspire future biomedical innovations. The team has already “pre-selected” around fifty bacteria, candidates for transposing their properties into concrete applications.
CRREL boasts a long tradition of cold science: “We have 60-year-old technical reports that are still used today to explain how to take ice cores in the middle of nowhere in -40°C.”recalls Barbato. And she warns: with already 52% completely new species in these samples, “We have every reason to believe that the more we search, the more new species we will discover. It’s incredibly exciting to work at the microbiological frontier.”
