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The concept of “cryosleep” — spending prolonged periods of time in suspended animation in a deep freeze state — has been a mainstay in the world of science fiction.
While the idea of slumbering peacefully while covering vast distances in space on board a spacecraft remains a distant dream, researchers are inching ever closer to turning it into a reality.
As detailed in a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this month, a team of researchers at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in Germany managed to return activity to mouse brains after carefully preserving the tissue in a glass-like state, a method called vitrification, before slowly thawing them.
“If brain function is an emergent property of its physical structure, how can we recover it from complete shutdown?” lead author and University of Erlangen–Nuremberg neurologist Alexander German told Nature.
Instead of suspending entire human bodies, like Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in the horror sci-fi blockbuster “Alien,” German and his colleagues suggest that their findings could lay the groundwork for protecting the brain following severe injury, preserving donor organs, or even suspending the entire bodies of mammals through cryopreservation.
The act of freezing is incredibly damaging to organic tissue, as ice crystals can rupture cellular walls. And that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg the researchers had to face.
“Beyond ice, we must account for several considerations, including osmotic stress and toxicity due to cryoprotectants,” German told Nature.
To avoid forming any ice crystals, the team focused on vitrification for their attempts to restore activity in frozen mouse brains, which traps molecules in a glass-like state by cooling liquids at extremely fast speeds.
“We wanted to see if function could restart after the complete cessation of molecular mobility in the vitreous state,” German explained.
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