Scientist Discovers a Protist’s “Cellular Origami” — The First Known Case
Sometimes evidence for design is subtle and arcane, discernible only through careful logic and mathematical analysis.
At other times, the exquisite design of life just seems to hit you over the head. That’s how I felt when I saw the cover illustration for the June issue of Science. The illustration depicts the single-celled protist Lacrymaria olor in a state of expansion and a state of contraction: the first ever known case of “cellular origami.”
The discovery came from the lab of Stanford’s Manu Prakash, who spent seven years uncovering the folding/unfolding mechanism. Stanford Report does a good job describing the mesmerizing beauty of it:
…a single teardrop-shaped cell swims in a droplet of pond water. In an instant, a long, thin “neck” projects out from the bulbous lower end. And it keeps going. And going. Then, just as quickly, the neck retracts back, as if nothing had happened.
In seconds, a cell that was just 40 microns tip-to-tail sprouted a neck that extended 1500 microns or more out into the world. It is the equivalent of a 6-foot human projecting its head more than 200 feet. All from a cell without a nervous system.
This “incredibly complex behavior,” as Dr. Prakash says, is derived from literal origami. The structure of the cell membrane is folded in a “curved crease origami” style that allows it to extend and retract consistently — 50,000 times in the lifetime of a protist, without any errors.
Destined for Origami?
Origami seems to be following Dr. Prakash. As chance would have it, before he discovered the origami of Lacrymaria olor, he had already used origami in his own engineering designs. (Or maybe his experience with origami made him ready to recognize it when he encountered it in nature?) Prakash invented an origami microscope, dubbed a “foldscope,” that costs only $1.75 to produce. In 2014, he mailed 50,000 foldscopes to recipients all around the world. His aim was to inspire and empower people to begin doing science in far-flung places where expensive and unwieldly lab equipment is impractical. A New Yorker piece lists some delightful outcomes of his project:
A plant pathologist in Rwanda uses the Foldscope to study fungi afflicting banana crops. Maasai children in Tanzania examine bovine dung for parasites. An entomologist in the Peruvian Amazon has happened upon an unidentified species of mite. One man catalogues pollen; another tracks his dog’s menstrual cycle.
A few years back, Prakash himself used his invention to discover a different amazing design feature in nature. He was looking at marsh water through his foldscope when he witnessed a single-celled Spirostomum suddenly contract to a fraction of its original size. Prakash discovered that Spirostomum are able to contract in response to danger in just 5 milliseconds, and the resulting ripples in the water trigger other nearby Spirostomum cells to do the same in a rapid domino effect — a previously undiscovered form of intercellular communication.
Biology and Engineering
You will probably not be surprised to hear that Dr. Prakash is an engineer as well as a biologist. This is predictable, because engineers tend to have a design-oriented mindset that is very well suited to discovering the design plans of living organisms. Prakash and his lab attack biology problems like engineers studying the artifacts of a more advanced civilization, tracking the tiniest movements of microbes in the lab to uncover the underlying mechanisms that enables them to function the way they do.
So it’s also not surprising that Prakash is dreaming of design applications for what he’s seen in Lacrymaria olor. Prakash thinks that tiny machines based on the design of Lacrymaria olor could be used for telescopes and surgical robots, among other applications.
It wouldn’t be the first time Prakash has copied ideas from life. According to the New Yorker piece, Prakash molds the lenses of his foldscopes using a device he created based on the beak of a red-necked phalarope, a bird that moves its beak in a “rapid tweezing motion” to mold droplets of food and water into aspherical shapes before swallowing them.
Life and Art
It’s a never-ending story: engineers uncover the engineering of nature by drawing analogies to human feats of engineering, and what they see in nature inspires them to engineer new innovations, which are used to uncover new engineering features in nature…and on and on.
Art imitates life, and life imitates art, and at some point the distinction between the two becomes blurry. Where does one end and the other begin?
Maybe the line is imaginary. To call the structure of Lacrymaria olor “origami” is not merely to draw a comparison — it really is origami. In fact, when Prakash and his team refer to it as “curved crease origami,” they are referring to a specific type of origami that originated in the Bauhaus art school in Germany in the late 1920s.
Little did those German origamists know, they’d been beaten to the punch. Oh, well. Perhaps the best any human artist can do is imitate the Greater Artist.
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