Latest lab pre-print: Excited to share yet another strange beast from our zoo - Emergent hunting mechanics of Lacrymaria olor - an incredible ciliate. biorxiv.org/content/early/… Phenomenal work by Scott Coyle scottmcoyle.com - postdoc in lab leading this effort.
This is a team effort, led by amazing postdoc Scott Coyle; who started as a biochemist - but morphed into a system biologist. Congrats to all co-authors including Scott, Ellie Fluam, Hongquan Li and @deepak_me90 To appreciate this story, start with movies: youtube.com/playlist?list=…
The question we ask here is - how is complex morphological behavior encoded in active systems in this incredible hunting ciliate? We find that multiple antagonistic active systems (contractile proteins and ciliary dynamics) work together to encode complex behavior of single cells
The fun back story of this begins when Scott joined the lab and we both went MicrobeHunting on regular Foldscope expedition. This was his first time Foldscoping. In his first slide under foldscope; he spots something I have been searching for the last 5 yrs. Lacrymaria,the hunter
I am so proud I accidentally captured the moment Scott (scottmcoyle.com) scooped Lacrymaria out of swamp. Not so glorious shot, but crucial moment for us to begin the project. With help from other ciliate biologists, we had lab cultures and we were off to a flying start. 
Hongquan (graduate student in the lab) joined project soon; and his microscopy expertise led Scott to uncover longterm morphological dynamics - something you can only see after capturing millions of data points with autonomous microscopes observing every move a cell makes.
We soon discovered that the search cloud of this hunting ciliate are incredibly comprehensive. The paper describes how shape modes of extension and buckling dynamics of this single cell encodes this comprehensive search space. We like to think of this as #MorphologicalComputing.
What is fascinating is that the ciliary dynamics leading to hydrodynamic forces on this organism is fascinating in its own right; but combined with the geometry and cortex contractility - we have a powerful system. Here is a high speed video of cilia in action.
No PrakashLab paper would be complete without hint of #FlowTrace - reveals differential contributions of head and neck cilia. Scott often calls this a ghost of Lacry. Ellie enabled much of the incredible confocal imaging & more. Ton of theoretical insights also came from Deepak.
This is first in series of Lacry papers we are preparing - lot more to come as we tame this beautiful "non-model" organism - keep an eye & enjoy 100's of hours of Lacry videos at our latest Youtube channel - Ciliate World; curated by Scott and Hongquan. youtube.com/channel/UCRc3j…
Also; shout-out to another really nice recent Lacry paper by Ryuji and Seiji (University of Hyogo) and help with cultures. jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jop/51…
Last, but not the least, Scott (scottmcoyle.com) is in the job market this year. Would be an incredible colleague anywhere he goes. Catch him while you can ;)
Thanks to @c3STC @cziscience BioHub, US Army @HHMINEWS and others for fueling our curiosities with actual funds
Thanks to @c3STC @cziscience BioHub, US Army @HHMINEWS and others for fueling our curiosities with actual funds
@FlaumEllie (early biophysics graduate student in the lab), second-author on the paper is now also on Twitter. Sorry for the misspelled name earlier Ellie. I should have caught that..
