Do microorganisms have a “handshake” – ciliate aggregation – Chilodonella

Jul 09, 2016 • 4:37 PM UTC

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140x Magnification

Microorganisms

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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Life at microscopic length scales is dense. As we often say, a tiny drop of a pond is “teeming”. So isn’t it obvious that they will physically interact with each other. After watching the video I am about to share; I wondered – old micro-organisms have a secret “handshake”.
The idea is simple. Can single cell eukaryotes actually identify similar species while interacting with each other physically. When we bump into another fellow human being – we do a hand shake. So could microorganisms – specially ciliates – advance single cell organisms have a secret hand shake to detect each other.
Here is a video of a common ciliate – Chilodonella (most likely) taken with a Foldscope (140x) and light module (hence the blue color).

What’s interesting to note is they form a cluster; and every time one of them is about to get out of the cluster configuration – it turns around and joins back. The cluster stayed for another minute or so; and suddenly – just like that; disappeared. These observations point to complexity of behavior of single celled organisms – and how much we still have left to learn from such simple observations.
Now; if you have followed our Foldscope community for a while; you know of @Laks (Foldscope user) observations on a series of micro-organisms interacting with each other and “deciding” to disintegrate at a sudden notice (go to the bottom of the post for the video).
Life in a liter of Pond water –Day 6: A mysterious dance, fun and games
As a community, we are starting to document many fascinating behaviors of live micro-organisms that are not understood. This fascinating ecological observations have a potential to truly expand our knowledge of what “life” is really like at the small scale. Making a database of microorganism behavior would be a wonderful endeavor I would invite other Foldscope users to join. Please share what strange behavior you have observed with your Foldscope.
Cheers
Manu
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