Find it here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.24.720652v1.abstract.
Antarctic fish are cold-blooded, which means their body temperatures are between -2 and 2 °C year-round. Such low temperatures pose major challenges to the foundations of animal cellular function, at least as we know it from studying species that live at warmer temperatures. So how have Antarctic fish adapted to survive in this extremely cold habitat?
To discover how Antarctic fish meet these challenges, we established the first cell cultures from these species: by growing Antarctic fish cells on glass in a controlled environment, we were able to perform live-cell super-resolution microscopy to study their intracellular structures. This showed that while subcellular organisation is broadly the same as in a comparator fish species from a warmer habitat, important differences exist, such as in the structure of the mitochondria, which generate the cell’s energy. Using this model system in future, we aim to better understand how Antarctic cells can withstand cold-associated stresses like poor protein folding, which also occurs in other contexts like human diseases, and how this can be exploited in biotechnological and biomedical applications.
This has been, and continues to be, a fantastic cross-disciplinary effort across the British Antarctic Survey and the Cambridge University Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, with contributions to this paper from Francesca van Tartwijk, Anne-Pia Marty, Amir Rahmani, Yuetong Jia, Edward Ward, Isa Hussain, Lloyd Peck, Clemens Kaminski, and Melody Clark.
We look forward to discussions about this work with the rest of the research community!
Image: the actin cytoskeleton (and nucleus) of an Antarctic fish cell in culture (scale bar 5 μm).