Scientist Who Created Origami Microscopes Observes a Tiny ‘Origami’ Creature
Bioengineer Manu Prakash had a vision to make microscopes accessible so everyone could experience the wonders of what’s happening under our noses all around us. In 2011, he had an epiphany at a clinic in a Thai rainforest, which only had one expensive microscope. A moment of insight led to ‘origami microscopes,’ or Foldscopes made mostly of paper cardstock.
The 1$ origami microscopes have since ended up in the hands of 2 million people. The Stanford researcher’s dreams since childhood in rural India came to fruition and unlocked what he considers his “superpower” to everyone. Observing what’s happening at the microscopic level could help explain the world’s mysteries if only more people from all walks of life could observe.
“All of us have some superpower,” he said. “I’ve always felt this is observation for me. Observing the world is really powerful. I get so much joy out of just watching what literally unfolds right in front of our noses.”
Thanks to origami microscopes, scientists have made progress in areas such as animal health, environmental research, education, and agriculture. Prakash also uses the Foldscopes for fun, and that’s what led to an incredible discovery and, one might say, a bizarre synchronicity.
Video about the Foldscope and Manu Prakash by the Moore Foundation:
Origami Microscope Leads to Origami Creature
If you write it as it really happened it seems like it couldn’t possibly be real. Yet it is. Prakash used his origamic microscope to observe a tiny predator with a body that uses origami structures to stretch to incredible lengths.
“It is incredibly complex behavior,” Prakash says.
The ‘beautiful and mesmerizing‘ creature is a protist, Lacrymaria olor, found in freshwater puddles, ponds, rivers, or lakes. The poetic name means “tear of a swan” in Latin.
Although it’s just a single cell, it’s incredibly complex, changing ‘sexes‘ depending on the time of day and stretching a long swan-like ‘neck’ to catch prey to incredible lengths in seconds. Then, the neck retracts back into the ‘body’ as if it wasn’t there.
“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,” writes Stanford Report.
Its body and neck contain ‘birefringent crystals,’ an optical property that can be observed in anisotropic (having different physical properties in different directions) elastic materials.
It has been observed ‘resurrecting’ like a tardigrade after completely drying out into a nearly invisible cyst. (It might bring to mind the human characters in the Sci-Fi 3 Body Problem!)
It also reproduces asexually.
Prakash and graduate student Eliott Flaum observed the extreme elasticity of Lacrymaria olor with live imaging, confocal, and transmission electron microscopy. Incredibly, they uncovered something entirely new: cellular origami was at work.
Video showing Lacrymaria olor by New Scientist:
The First Example of Cellular Origami
The researchers discovered a “geometric mechanism” was at work inside the cell’s membrane. When it stretches the neck, it unfolds and refolds in a way like origami. It’s a ‘helical accordion’ which reliably works every time.
“When you store pleats on the helical angle in this way, you can store an infinite amount of material,” Flaum explained. “Biology has figured this out.”
Along the cell’s membrane, 15 helical microtubules form a crease pattern similar to ‘curved-crease origami.’ The tiny strings are the creature’s cytoskeleton. As they fold and unfold along the same point, the scientists call it a ‘singularity’ that acts like a ‘geometric controller.’
“It is geometry. L. olor’s behavior is encoded in its cytoskeletal structure, just like human behavior is encoded in neural circuits,” the report states.
Now, the findings hiding inside the cytoskeleton of L. olor may fold open many new doors, such as in bioengineered materials and even micro-robotics, the study concluded.
“Our work also provides direct inspiration for deployable micro-robotics and light-weight space architecture. The blueprints we have been looking for to bring agency and embedded control in micro-robotics might be hidden in plain sight in the geometrical diversity of protists,” the study found.
