Intracellular trehalose improves osmotolerance but not desiccation tolerance in mammalian cells

Trehalose has been shown to play a role in osmotolerance or desiccation tolerance in some microorganisms, anhydrobiotic invertebrates and resurrection plants. To test whether trehalose could improve stress responses of higher eukaryotes, a mouse cell line was genetically engineered to express bacterial trehalose synthase genes. We report that the resulting levels of intracellular trehalose (∼80 mM) are able to confer increased resistance to the partial dehydration resulting from hypertonic stress, but do not enable survival of complete desiccation due to air drying.