抄録
Anhydrobiosis is an extremely dehydrated state in which organisms show no detectable metabolism with the ability to revive upon immersion into water. Larvae of an African chironomid, Polypedilum vanderplanki, are the largest multicellular animal capable of anhydrobiosis. Recently we have successfully clarified the physicochemical mechanism of their anhydrobiosis. When larvae of P. vanderplanki fell into an anhydrobiotic state, they accumulated endogenously non-reducing disaccharide, α,α-trehalose, as high as 25 % of their dry body mass, which was found to be uniformly distributed throughout the dehydrated body by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) microscopic mapping image. Differential scanning calorimetry measurements indicated that the anhydrobiotic larvae were in a glassy state up to ca. 65 ℃. Changing from the glassy to rubbery state by either heating or allowing slight moisture uptake led to their very poor survival ability. FT-IR spectra showed that the cellular membrane of the anhydrobiotic larvae remained in the liquid-crystalline state throughout formation of hydrogen bonds between its phospholipids and the endogenous trehalose. Taken these findings together we concluded that trehalose plays important roles in biological glass formation as the water replacement, although other compounds would be also involved in these phenomena.
https://ror.org/0112mx960 
