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APS-DBIO Profile picture
@ApsDbio
May 27, 2021 • 11 tweets • 9 min read • Read on X
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It's #DBIOtweetorial time! Your host is Saad Bhamla @BhamlaLab. Today we'll learn about 10 ultrafast movements in organisms - from single cells to multicellular beasts. We hope to get you thinking engg+bio+physics of extreme movements.
#EngageDBIO #UltrafastOrganisms.
Contrary to common perception, cheetahs and falcons are not the fastest animals. Mantis shrimps for example can use a saddle-shaped spring to hammer at ~100,000 m/s^2. This is so blazing fast, it cavitates surrounding fluid. nature.com/articles/42881…
Trap jaw ants use their spring-loaded jaws to jump at faster acceleration of 10^6 m/s^2 in 0.06 ms. Faster than the blink of an eye or a bullet from a gun !! How to build robots at this scale and speed remains an open challenge. pnas.org/content/103/34…
Some animals can build their spring to launch like these slingshot spiders in the Amazon Rainforest to capture flying insects in mid-air, in pitch black night. How do they do sense prey and aim? Full thread here including comics. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Single cells can exhibit ultrafast movements too. Here Spirostomum , a large (5mm!!) ciliate contracts in the blink of an eye. It uses ill-understood supramolecular assemblies triggered by Ca2+ for hydrodynamic communication. FT: nature.com/articles/s4158…
The world record for fastest acceleration belongs to a single cells from jellyfish - nematocytes. If you've ever been stung by jellyfish on beach, you've experienced a 700ns ~50,410,000 m/s^2 (50 MILLION!) event. The bio-fluid-mechanics remain puzzling. cell.com/current-biolog…
Plants can move fast too. Venus flytrap uses mechanical trigger hairs to increase cytosolic Ca2+ (to count) and a snap-buckling instability to release stored energy to capture prey. nature.com/articles/s4147… nature.com/articles/natur…
Other plants and fungi use explosive movements to disperse spores and seeds. These involve complex biomechanics, fluid dynamics and extraordinary energy storage/release mechanisms. Many open puzzles and discoveries to be made... journals.plos.org/plosone/articl… science.sciencemag.org/content/308/57…
Tiny insects like sharpshooters can also exploit ultrafast movements to disperse bodily fluids (pee). Their butt-flickers are tightly-tuned biological catapults. How they sense droplet size and why they do this is unknown.
Ultrafast extreme biomechanics is an emerging and exciting field at the nexus of bio/engg/robotics/physics. Shift from power amplification (limits of muscles) to now latch-mediated spring actuated framework (LaMSA). science.sciencemag.org/content/360/63… doi.org/10.1242/jeb.19…
Signing off here, your #DBIOTweetorial host, Saad Bhamla @BhamlaLab. Please join in thanking the fantastic #EngageDBIO team for making these tweetorials possible!

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More from @ApsDbio

APS-DBIO Profile picture
Oct 7, 2021
Hello and welcome to this week’s #DBIOTweetorial by Prof. Madhusudhan Venkadesan @v_madhu. Let’s go!
Feet and fins are quite different in their anatomy. But both have to be stiff enough to withstand the forces of propulsion. Are there deeper connections between them?

Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature…
Video:
All land vertebrates, or tetrapods, evolved from aquatic ancestors over 370 million years ago. So we and all land vertebrates are fish, in a manner of speaking!

Limbs evolved from fins, but the earliest tetrapod probably used a fin to move on land.

Ref: jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16…
Read 13 tweets
APS-DBIO Profile picture
Aug 5, 2021
Hello, it's a gorgeous Thursday! Time for a #DBIOTweetorial. A special edition this week — an inaugural *Editweetorial* by your host today, Prof. Bill Bialek @wbialek. #DBIOEditweetorial Image
Biological systems are complicated. If we try to make “realistic” models we are led into a forest of parameters. If we are going to have a theoretical physicist’s understanding of life, we have to find principles that cut through this complexity.
Maybe a #DBIOEditweetorial provides just enough space to summarize different strategies in the search for principles. Links are to papers that illustrate these ideas, and of course are just a sampling. Please respond with your own favorites.
Read 12 tweets
APS-DBIO Profile picture
Jun 17, 2021
Have you seen images of bacteria and wondered, “How do they form such strange shapes?” or “Why do they all look so different?” Join us for today's #DBIOTweetorial as we dive into how and why bacteria adopt the shapes they do! #EngageDBIO @goleylab @jordanmbarrows
As Kevin Young eloquently put it, “To be brutally honest, few people care that bacteria have different shapes. Which is a shame, because the bacteria seem to care very much.” Check out how diverse bacterial shapes can be! tinyurl.com/6d93vce4 tinyurl.com/uvbtwvs3
Bacterial shape is largely determined by the peptidoglycan (PG) cell wall, a large macromolecule that surrounds cells and provides structure and support. PG is necessary to maintain cell shape - cells burst when treated with drugs that target PG!
tinyurl.com/m4dys6hb
Read 12 tweets
APS-DBIO Profile picture
Jun 10, 2021
Are the screaming BroodX cicadas driving you nuts? Wonder how such tiny insects even make such a racket? You’ve come to the right place! I study how insects make and hear sound. By the end of this I hope I can show what biophysical marvels they are! #DBIOTweetorial @NatashaMhatre
So what is sound? It’s a disturbance in a medium, generated by a moving object. In this cool gif, by @drussellpsu, you can you see a grey bar moving back and forth within a pipe. The air in the pipe is pushed around, and the disturbance within it (sound) travels through the air.
So anything that moves makes a sound?

Yup, pretty much! The world is full of it: the wind shakes leaves, they rustle; tires vibrate because of friction, and they rumble.

But how ‘loud’ the sound is depends on quite a few things!

frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
Read 12 tweets
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Jun 3, 2021
It's #DBIOtweetorial time, with your host @gibbological from @isbsci. Today, you'll get some facts about the ~10^13 microbes that call your gut home. By the end, I hope that you'll see yourself as much more than a mere human. You are an ecosystem! #EngageDBIO #microbiome 💩🦠🧑‍🔬
In the womb, we are sterile (obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…). At birth, our mothers (and surrounding environment) act as our 'sour-dough starter culture,' inoculating us with hundreds-to-thousands of species. The exact composition of this 'microbiome' is as unique to us as our genome.
Topologically speaking, humans are doughnuts. The entire outside of this doughnut is *covered* in microbes (mostly bacteria). Most of our microbes live in the colon. There are about 3*10^13 human cells and 4*10^13 bacterial cells in the body (doi.org/10.1371/journa…).
Read 12 tweets
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May 20, 2021
It's #DBIOtweetorial time! Your host, Wallace Marshall. Welcome to 10 Crazy Things Cells Do. We hope to get you thinking about the complexity of cells + challenges in learning physical principles that underly cell behavior. Let's get started!
#EngageDBIO #XtremeCellBiology.
Cells can be really big. Many cells are small, but some are gigantic. Each little "plant" in this picture is a single algal cell, Acetabularia, more than 10 cm long. What determines the size of cells? bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…
Cells can walk. You think of cells creeping along on a glass slide, but cells can move in more complex ways. @BEuplotes studies cells that can walk using 14 tiny feet. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Read 12 tweets

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