As you might guess, it’s a big day for astonishing discoveries across the blogowebs:
- Darren reveals the curious case of the Pleistocene kuhenosaurs that may have given rise to dragon myths (though be sure see my alternate hypothesis from last year).
- Bill Parker (who has been covering the enigmatic Triassic hellasaur beat in my absence) announces the discovery of a truly enigmatic (with a capital “Gee!”) feathered pseudosuchian.
- Brian has details on a giant aquatic lemur–hey they had to get to Madagascar somehow right?
- Carel reminds us about the fascinating life history of the assassin dock.
- Chris Rowan provides further info about the Cryogenian lagomorph to which I alluded several weeks back.
- Altoon Dooley shares photos of the ever elusive wooly snake.
Topping all of these however is the paper by Daniel Fels published today in PLOS One entitled: “Cellular Communication Through Light.” Fels documents the interactions among different populations of a single-celled ciliate, Paramecium caudatum, seperated by glass. Because the glass barriers effectively prohibit the transfer of chemical signals, Fels infers that these simple organisms are using a form of weak electromagnetic radiation, so-called biophotons, to communicate. I’m guessing Rupert Sheldrake is pretty damn excited about this one.
Here’s the abstract:
Information transfer is a fundamental of life. A few studies have reported that cells use photons (from an endogenous source) as information carriers. This study finds that cells can have an influence on other cells even when separated with a glass barrier, thereby disabling molecule diffusion through the cell-containing medium. As there is still very little known about the potential of photons for intercellular communication this study is designed to test for non-molecule-based triggering of two fundamental properties of life: cell division and energy uptake. The study was performed with a cellular organism, the ciliate Paramecium caudatum. Mutual exposure of cell populations occurred under conditions of darkness and separation with cuvettes (vials) allowing photon but not molecule transfer. The cell populations were separated either with glass allowing photon transmission from 340 nm to longer waves, or quartz being transmittable from 150 nm, i.e. from UV-light to longer waves. Even through glass, the cells affected cell division and energy uptake in neighboring cell populations. Depending on the cuvette material and the number of cells involved, these effects were positive or negative. Also, while paired populations with lower growth rates grew uncorrelated, growth of the better growing populations was correlated. As there were significant differences when separating the populations with glass or quartz, it is suggested that the cell populations use two (or more) frequencies for cellular information transfer, which influences at least energy uptake, cell division rate and growth correlation. Altogether the study strongly supports a cellular communication system, which is different from a molecule-receptor-based system and hints that photon-triggering is a fine tuning principle in cell chemistry.
Like all PLOS publications, the paper is open-access and is freely available here:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005086
Refs.
2009 Cellular Communication through Light. PLoS ONE 4(4): e5086. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005086
