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Environment

Nanosuit Protects Living Bugs In Vacuum

Organisms such as fruit fly larvae survive for at least an hour under vacuum when shielded by a flexible polymer membrane

by Lauren K. Wolf
April 22, 2013 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 91, Issue 16

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Credit: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA
Scanning a fruit fly larva with an electron microscope (left) generates a nanosuit that keeps it alive for 60 minutes under vacuum; without the nanosuit, the larva collapses (right).
SEM images of two fruit fly larvae. The one on top looks healthy, plump, and normal. The one on the bottom looks desiccated and dead.
Credit: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA
Scanning a fruit fly larva with an electron microscope (left) generates a nanosuit that keeps it alive for 60 minutes under vacuum; without the nanosuit, the larva collapses (right).

When scientists put living organisms such as bacteria into the high-vacuum environment of a scanning electron microscope (SEM), things don’t end well for the critters. They rapidly dehydrate, collapse, and die. But as a team of researchers in Japan recently found, some organisms can live under vacuum for at least an hour when protected by a durable polymer membrane (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1221341110). This protective nanosuit, as the team calls it, might enable scientists to study the fine structure of living organisms and tissues with high-vacuum equipment in the future. Takahiko Hariyama of Hamamatsu University School of Medicine and coworkers noticed that fruit fly larvae continued to inch around under vacuum for an hour after being scanned with an SEM’s electron beam. If the larvae were not exposed to the beam but left under vacuum for an hour, they died. So Hariyama and coworkers concluded that the electron beam had polymerized the larvae’s outer coating of “extracellular substances,” forming a dehydration barrier. Mosquito larvae, which are not covered with these substances, survived under vacuum when the researchers dipped them in a polymerlike detergent and scanned them. The larvae went on to develop into normal adult mosquitoes after being removed from the microscope.

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