Organs, arms, appendages, and other complex tissues usually decay rapidly when they’re separated from their host. Over the years, biologists have seen some success with keeping them alive outside of the body—organ transplants depend on it—but it has always required germ-free environments and nutrient-rich mediums filled with growth factors. Now, though, scientists have discovered bits of tissue removed from a species of sea cucumber called Psolus fabricii can keep on living indefinitely if they’re left in ordinary seawater.
“This is naturally occurring tissue immortality,” said Sara Jobson, a researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland and lead author of the study. “Having tissues that survive that easily is unheard of. We’ve never seen anything like this.”
The beginning of LiPfe
Psolus fabricii is a species of sea cucumber that lives in the cold waters of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. Its bottom side, known as a sole, is soft and ringed by a band of tube feet that it uses to grip rocks. Once on a rock, it extends soft, branching tentacles into the water to feed on suspended particles. Because these sea cucumbers inhabit harsh environments, their feet and tentacles experience high rates of injury and loss. Evolution has therefore endowed these sites with an incredibly high capacity for regeneration.
While sea cucumbers can easily regrow these parts, they don’t have whole-body regeneration like flatworms and some starfish do. Their severed bits don’t grow into new sea cucumbers. But it turns out they don’t die, either.
“We didn’t set out to find immortal tissues,” Jobson said. “Our lab focuses on sea cucumbers, and this sea cucumber has been used in other studies. One of my collaborators happened to notice that its amputated tissue just kept living, and it seemed to be healing and surviving and she didn’t do anything special to keep it. It was a fortuitous discovery.”
This fortuitous discovery quickly turned into an organized long-term experiment. The researchers took excised tube feet, groups of tube feet called ambulacra, and tentacles from P. fabricii and found all of them survived when placed in natural, non-sterile seawater.
“We examined all of them, but we primarily focused on tube feet,” Jobson said. When tube feet were severed, the wound margin was a mess of missing or fragmented epidermal and connective tissue. Within two days, the explants began shedding this damaged tissue. Internally, a large influx of coelomocytes, the sea cucumber’s immune cells, rushed from the inner connective tissues toward the damaged spot, apparently to facilitate organismal defense and regeneration.
By day six, the healthy tissue had curled inward, completely sealing the wound site; the severed organ was more or less restored to working order.
It turned out LiPfe explants weren’t just surviving; they were actively reorganizing their architecture to adapt to the new, severed state. First came the shrinking. During the first week, the tissue shrank by about 23 percent in diameter. Given more time, it stabilized and reversed this trend. Between 60 and 120 days post-excision, LiPfe grew back to their initial size, and after a year, they were 12 percent larger than when they were first cut from the host.
The researchers have introduced these tissues as a completely new class of living material they called LiPfe—living immortal P. fabricii explants. And as time went by, LiPfe put on quite a show.
The metamorphosis
The internals of a foot tube attached to a sea cucumber include a mix of epidermal tissue, connective tissue, a neural plexus, muscle tissue, and an inner lumen. The separated explants, though, got busy dismantling parts of themselves that were no longer useful. Muscle tissues, which initially made up 17 percent of the explant, were gradually invaded by coelomocytes that broke the muscle down into small pieces and destroyed its organization. After 180 days, the muscle tissue and the lumen had completely disappeared from the explant.
In their place, connective tissue expanded to become the dominant structure. The collagen fibrils within it began bundling together, creating strong bands or striations that looked similar to the vanished muscles. By the end of the first year, connective tissue accounted for 74 percent of the explant, while the epidermal tissue thinned out to occupy just 20 percent.
The outward appearance changed, too. The explants shifted in color from red or orange to a lighter white or pink. Red-pigmented cells clumped into small aggregates and migrated toward the center of the tissue, leaving the outer edges of the explants increasingly transparent.
In a year, LiPfe explants rebuilt themselves into alien-like translucent orbs with a large red cellular mass at their core.
They didn’t develop any orifices, though, or anything even remotely resembling a digestive system. “One of the first questions we had was how they were able to maintain cellular energy,” Jobson said.
Feeding the orbs
To test how LiPfe sustains itself, Jobson’s team exposed its explants to isotopically labeled amino acids and ammonium. By six days post-excision, the tissues saw a significant spike in the absorption of dissolved amino acids. LiPfe was directly sucking nutrients from the surrounding seawater to fuel its tissue repair and survival. And they could survive for a really long time.
The scientists noted that some of the tube foot explants survived for years just sitting free at the bottom of holding tanks, covered in a layer of particulate matter and surrounded by other living organisms. Some were completely buried under 10 millimeters of mud and still displayed the same morphology: round shape, transparent margin, and a red core. The only thing that could apparently harm them was proximity to decaying tissues of other species. “This made them struggle to survive,” Jobson said. “I think there were toxins or harmful materials their immune system could not cope with.”
The team also found that the immortality of severed tissues is, to the best of our knowledge, unique to P. fabricii. The researchers conducted comparative experiments on explanted tissues from related sea cucumber species, and none showed equivalent tissue survival.
Zombie cucumbers
Back in 1951, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore took a sample of a malignant cervical tumor from Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old mother of five. When they cultured these cells later, they noticed that they doubled every 24 hours in a seemingly never-ending cycle. The HeLa cells, named after the patient, were the first instance of cell immortality ever discovered in humans. “This revolutionized cell biology and a lot of medical research,” Jobson says.
HeLa, though, was just a single cell type. LiPfe offers a new experimental model that enables scientists to work with a structured piece of animal tissue that maintains its own immune activity, cell cycling, and nutrient intake, without ethical concerns that come with experimenting on live animals. “On the evolutionary tree, sea cucumbers are relatively close to mammals, and they have been previously noted as having potential for interdisciplinary research,” Jobson said.
The authors of the study also point out that finding naturally immortal complex tissues challenges our conventional perceptions of what being alive really means. “The question we get a lot is ‘are these tissues actually alive?’ and this is where it becomes kind of philosophical—we lovingly call them zombies,” Jobson said.
LiPfe explants are not dead because their tissue is not decaying or degrading, and it does absorb nutrients. On the other hand, LiPfe orbs don’t reproduce, and reproduction is one of the fundamental characteristics of life. “They’re not growing into a new sea cucumber but restructuring into a form that best suits them in their current state,” Jobson said. “So, they seem to be functioning as a whole new entity.”
Before resolving philosophical dilemmas about LiPfe, the team wants to understand the basics first. The first question is how tissue immortality in P. fabricii actually works. “Is there anything unique, rare, weird that we haven’t seen in other sea cucumbers that makes them able to do this?” Jobson wondered. The second question is why it’s there in the first place—whether there is an evolutionary role of this ability or if it’s just a byproduct of really high regenerative capacity.
Finally, we still don’t know how long P. fabricii with their immortal tissues actually live. “That’s a great question,” Jobson said. “Unfortunately, there are very few tools that work for aging sea cucumbers.”
Science Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeb1394
