Every cell relies on proteins folding into the right shape, a process cell biologist Francesca van Tartwijk compares to origami. In the human brain, folding errors play a role in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's disease. Cold makes those errors more likely inside the spiny plunderfish, a small fish that lives on the seabed in the waters of the Southern Ocean and sub-Antarctic islands. Temperatures there stay between 28.8 degrees Fahrenheit (−1.8 degrees Celsius) and 35.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) all year, yet its cells keep working.
Van Tartwijk and her colleagues have now captured the first images inside living Antarctic fish cells at near-freezing temperatures. They became the first to successfully grow Antarctic fish cells in the lab and found enlarged structures that may help break down damaged proteins. The images give researchers a way to investigate how the fish copes with the cold, and whether its cells might eventually offer insights relevant to human disease or to storing donated human tissue in the cold. Their initial findings are available as a preprint.
“Our work is exciting and important because it allows us to explore questions that have, until now, remained beyond the reach of science. Our findings have the potential to affect a range of scientific disciplines and applications, far beyond ecology and the polar regions,” van Tartwijk said in a press release.
Explore All OptionsHow Researchers Looked Inside Living Antarctic Fish Cells
To follow movement inside the fish's cells, the team needed to keep them alive near 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) and capture more detail than earlier cold-temperature images allowed.
The researchers first developed a way to grow the fish's cells in the lab. Engineers at the University of Cambridge then built a microscope that could capture detailed images at that temperature, while fluorescent dyes made the cells' inner structures visible. For a point of comparison, the team examined cells from a shanny, a small fish from U.K. coastal waters.
"It is super exciting to be able to study living cells at sub-zero temperatures and see with our own eyes what is going on,” said Clemens Kaminski, a University of Cambridge professor who co-leads the project, in the press release.
Read More: Climate Change Could Expand the Reach of a Rare Brain-Eating Amoeba
A Slow-Growing Fish With Busy Cells
Although the plunderfish develops slowly, its mitochondria moved at roughly the same speed as those in the shanny's cells. Mitochondria help supply cells with energy. Their movement showed that slow growth on the outside does not mean everything inside slows to the same pace.
The researchers found larger lysosomes, which break down material a cell no longer needs. Those lysosomes might help clear proteins damaged by the cold, although their size alone cannot show how well they do that job. The plunderfish also had more mitochondria joined in networks, which may help its cells meet their energy needs when cold makes protein production less efficient.
What Happens When Antarctic Waters Warm?
"Antarctic animals are incredibly vulnerable to climate change — we already know this," said Melody Clark, a geneticist at the British Antarctic Survey who co-leads the project in the press release. "Raising temperatures just a few degrees can be lethal."
What remains unclear is where that limit begins, inside individual cells, or in larger systems such as circulation. Being able to watch living cells in the cold gives the team a way to investigate the first possibility. As Antarctic waters warm, researchers hope to learn whether the first signs of trouble appear inside the cells that keep this small fish alive in the cold.
Read More: A Narwhal's Mysterious Tusk Is Actually Made Up of Two Opposing Spirals
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a preprint published in bioRxiv: Antarctic fish cell cultures show adaptation of organelle morphology and dynamics to extreme cold
