Sampling Seine river in Paris

Jun 18, 2022 • 9:21 AM UTC

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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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Had a wonderful opportunity to attend cell motility meeting at College de France.
At the end of the meeting – Thomas Lecuit (Prof College de France) offered a walking tour of Paris. I was thrilled – it was late evening (10pm) and plenty of day light. After two days of sitting in conference room I was excited to “stroll”. Dr Christina Huschen and Prof Thibaut Brunet from Institute Pasteur (Paris) decided to join. It was a wonderful walk – loved every minute of it.
But the best part was walking around the river cutting through the city. We took the opportunity to go sample the Seine River in Paris.. it was a little bit tricky to get a small sample – but we’re we up for a surprise. Here Christina and I had to climb a little – but we were rewarded with a very nice find.
The saga is recorded in a list of tweets here: https://twitter.com/lecuitlab/status/1536805052081491968?s=21&t=QHWATzvSONsI_fvilJuR7w
Here are a few videos of the Foldscoping session at play

I also searched for a few flaggellets – and found what looks like a nanoflagellet – swimming and twirling It’s way in life.

It’s always a mystery – what on earth are all these single cells “thinking”
What’s surprising is I got to see the diatom-filamentous algae association. If you notice carefully – you find that specific diatom species are only found on specific filamentous algae. Now – how do diatoms know what species are they associating with?
So much we don’t know about mysterious diatoms – while they produce almost half of all the oxygen on this planet. It’s surprising and baffling in so many ways.
It’s been almost a decade since the invention of foldscope – and the more I foldscope – the more I become a strong believer that we all need to explore our world with an uninhibited passion for sharing curiosity. It was fun to see Parisians look at us in a funny way collecting samples. Sharing science is good for science – and good for humanity.
Keep exploring
Manu