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Quantum biology, doodles while listening to a lecture and a little book of ideas/ research✨️

Unusual antibiotic killing mechanism we just published in Nature

Our study about the unusual molecular mechanism behind the antibiotic activity of teixobactin can be read open access here: 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05019-y

Figure: The target of teixobactin are bacteria-specific molecules (e.g. they do not exist in human cells) in outer membranes of bacteria. Teixobactin sits on the membrane and aggregates into fibrils, damaging the bacterial membrane and hindering its functions. We got these images by atomic force microscopy that has nanometer resolution. We can see individual teixobactin molecules coming to the bacterial membrane and forming the aggregate.

This is the first star from my research on antibiotics that I started at my postdoc in the Netherlands. More are coming out soon! The very first star was published in Nature, the most read journal in life sciences. I am in scientific heaven!

Beyond eye gaze: What else can eyetracking reveal about cognition and cognitive development?

Slime Molds and Intelligence

Okay, despite going into a biology related field, I only just learned about slime molds, and hang on, because it gets WILD.

This guy in the picture is called Physarum polycephalum, one of the more commonly studied types of slime mold. It was originally thought to be a fungus, though we now know it to actually be a type of protist (a sort of catch-all group for any eukaryotic organism that isn't a plant, animal, or a fungus). As protists go, it's pretty smart. It is very good at finding the most efficient way to get to a food source, or multiple food sources. In fact, placing a slime mold on a map with food sources at all of the major cities can give a pretty good idea of an efficient transportation system. Here is a slime mold growing over a map of Tokyo compared to the actual Tokyo railway system:

Pretty good, right? Though they don't have eyes, ears, or noses, the slime molds are able to sense objects at a distance kind of like a spider using tiny differences in tension and vibrations to sense a fly caught in its web. Instead of a spiderweb, though, this organism relies on proteins called TRP channels. The slime mold can then make decisions about where it wants to grow. In one experiment, a slime mold was put in a petri dish with one glass disk on one side and 3 glass disks on the other side. Even though the disks weren't a food source, the slime mold chose to grow towards and investigate the side with 3 disks over 70% of the time.

Even more impressive is that these organisms have some sense of time. If you blow cold air on them every hour on the hour, they'll start to shrink away in anticipation when before the air hits after only 3 hours.

Now, I hear you say, this is cool and all, but like, I can do all those things too. The slime mold isn't special...

To which I would like to point out that you have a significant advantage over the slime mold, seeing as you have a brain.

Yeah, these protists can accomplish all of the things I just talked about, and they just... don't have any sort of neural architecture whatsoever? They don't even have brain cells, let alone the structures that should allow them to process sensory information and make decisions because of it. Nothing that should give them a sense of time. Scientists literally have no idea how this thing is able to "think'. But however it does, it is sure to be a form of cognition that is completely and utterly different from anything that we're familiar with.

Hunter gatherer, prying open the seeds, got curious enough, started peeling its own skin, digging underneath, born with scars on your hands, stardust, sun sent, the first flesh you ever tasted, your own, folded flesh underneath the bone, and two eyes gazing in oblivion, oblivious of obvious

“You look at trees and called them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree,’ ‘star,’ were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, from ‘Mythopoeia’