"To better understand how bears avoid dangerous blood clotting, a pair of cardiologists at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Tobias Petzold and Manuela Thienel, teamed up with a Scandinavian team and other researchers to study hibernating brown bears in Sweden.
For two winters, the researchers trekked through the snow to dig out sleeping brown bears wearing GPS collars. They tranquilized 13 bears, took blood samples, then returned the bears to their dens to finish their winter naps. The following summers, they tracked the same bears and took more blood samples. Collaborators at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry looked for seasonal differences in the bears’ blood that might explain why it did not clot in the winter...
The researchers noticed a protein called HSP47 was abundant in the bears’ blood during the summer, but virtually disappeared in the winter, Thienel and her colleagues report...
Previous work by Jon Gibbins, a cell biologist at the University of Reading, in mice had revealed that in addition to other functions, this protein sits on the surface of blood platelets involved in clot formation. Working with mice bred to lack this protein, Gibbins and his colleagues determined that platelets with less HSP47 were less likely to attract and bind to infection-fighting white blood cells called neutrophils—a key step in clot formation."
Full article @ https://www.science.org/content/article/now-we-know-why-hibernating-bears-don-t-get-blood-clots
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