Tardigrades - AKA water bears - are an emerging model system that we use to ask questions about the mechanisms and evolution of extreme stress tolerance.

What makes tardigrades a useful model to study extreme stress tolerance?

• Tardigrades are small (0.5mm) plump animals with four sets of legs. They can be found living in mosses and lichens where they feed on plant cells and algae.

• Tardigrades survive a number of environmental extremes: desiccation, freezing, high temperatures, anoxia/hypoxia, radiation, osmotic shock, etc.

• Many species are holo-tolerant, meaning they survive these extremes at every life stage! This is rare!

• Tardigrades have a small genome and a growing number of publicly available genome and transcriptome sequences.

• Reverse genetic approaches have been established, this really helps for identifying functional mediators of stress tolerance, since it allows us to ‘break’ genes and see what goes wrong.