The main problem with dehydration as I understand it is similar to that of cryopreservation, but worse: dehydration causes cells to shrink which damages organs. It also concentrates cellular components (salts, proteins, etc.) to the point where they start interacting with each other harmfully.
That said, it’s an interesting starting point. Mike Darwin has proposed replacing cellular water with some kind of solvent carrying monomers that form a hard polymer under controlled conditions, possibly similar to Amber. Once it polymerizes and forms a glass, the cell’s components would be unable to interact with each other. (The organism would be cooled to −20C using M22 for cryoprotection beforehand to minimize metabolic damage.)
The hard thing is getting a high concentration of anything into cells without rupturing them. Organisms like Tardigrades that achieve cryptobiosis (= anhydrobiosis) manufacture their own polymers such as Trehalose. Plants do the same with Sucrose. Cells have a special transport protein that yanks glucose (the most common sugar monomer) inside through the lipid membrane very quickly relative to their natural diffusion rate. Note that this is useful for cryoprotection, not just against dehydration.
Lately I’ve been wondering if Foldit could be used to design proteins that pull other things into cells faster. Could such an enzyme be programmed to embed itself in the cell wall? Perhaps something more like a virus could do this. Or perhaps a custom protein could turn glucose into a more suitable polymer under the right conditions.
The main problem with dehydration as I understand it is similar to that of cryopreservation, but worse: dehydration causes cells to shrink which damages organs. It also concentrates cellular components (salts, proteins, etc.) to the point where they start interacting with each other harmfully.
That said, it’s an interesting starting point. Mike Darwin has proposed replacing cellular water with some kind of solvent carrying monomers that form a hard polymer under controlled conditions, possibly similar to Amber. Once it polymerizes and forms a glass, the cell’s components would be unable to interact with each other. (The organism would be cooled to −20C using M22 for cryoprotection beforehand to minimize metabolic damage.)
The hard thing is getting a high concentration of anything into cells without rupturing them. Organisms like Tardigrades that achieve cryptobiosis (= anhydrobiosis) manufacture their own polymers such as Trehalose. Plants do the same with Sucrose. Cells have a special transport protein that yanks glucose (the most common sugar monomer) inside through the lipid membrane very quickly relative to their natural diffusion rate. Note that this is useful for cryoprotection, not just against dehydration.
Lately I’ve been wondering if Foldit could be used to design proteins that pull other things into cells faster. Could such an enzyme be programmed to embed itself in the cell wall? Perhaps something more like a virus could do this. Or perhaps a custom protein could turn glucose into a more suitable polymer under the right conditions.