Single cell does origami
When I was young, I was really good at mechanical puzzles, but I never learned origami. If I were to start now I’d be millions of years behind a single-celled organism that lives in freshwater ponds. It’s called Lacrymaria olor, and its superpower was elucidated at Stanford by Eliot Flaum and Manu Praksash.
Simply put, it uses an origami fold, a type called a curved-crease in its cell membrane. What’s so nifty, is that Lacrymaria olor can extend its “neck” to 20 times its resting length, in seconds, without needing to make new cell membrane area to do so. The membrane is pleated, and it follows the pre-folding of its internal network of proteins or cytoskeleton (we have these scaffolds in our cells, too, but not as nifty).
The cute little ciliate – well, let’s qualify that: it’s not so cute if you’re its prey that it’s trying to grab – can repeat the trick at least 20,000 times without spraining a membrane, we might say. The math of the folding is even cute, to a mathematician. In action it’s reminiscent of the party favor you blow into to extend a tube, making a noise. However, the unfolding is much more sophisticated and free of stressful curling. Moreover, the organism’s neck-stretching takes very little energy. As Flaum and Praksash note further, there are thousands of microorganisms whose behavior we haven’t studied, waiting to surprise us.
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org
Ref.: Physics Today, Aug. 2024, and Science, 7 June 2024
