Watching muscles in action

Apr 10, 2015 • 8:33 AM UTC

Kirkwood, CA 95646, USA

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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Geometry is an integral part of living structures. “Shape and form” defines function all the way from molecules to muscle architectures in multi-cellular animals. Intrigued by my previous foldscope adventures of looking at a head of an ant; this time I decided to find more “wrigling things” in the water. I am just amazed to the how muscles attach in complex geometry and are triggered in a perfect pattern to work together and perform a very specific function. The engineers doing “soft robotics” really have a long way to go. All the more reason to start in a field.
Here I caught a wriggling worm in a fresh water stream in Kirkwood (a Lake Tahoe region). I was fascinated by things in this pond because the temperature was freezing; in fact the water actually had a layer of ice on the water itself.

I brought some samples back and woke up Dino and Adrien Bos. Jim joined in a little bit (you can hear all our voices in excitement in this video).

Here is some brightfield data we collected. Watch till the end – when you get to see the fabulous muscle contractions; 100’s of muscles contracting in a coordinated fashion to give rise to a specific pattern. They are prt of the head – I was really hoping that this little monster eats something alive in the foldscope so we could see the head operating in action.

Enjoy the video. If you know the genus or anything more about this species; please share in comments below. What was peculiar is the fact that the head was heavily pigmented brown; although the rest of the body is pure white. That’s how i picked it up initially.
Cheers
Manu