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Attacked by Ooze!
🕑 Added 2021-09-07 16:00:05 +0000 UTCOur listener letheasce followed through on a horrifically amazing dining scenario! The explanation:
Hi Chad and Chris,
I am the microbiologist who promised to have the podcast to be eaten in effigy by tiny amoebas. I did it! Here are the photos.
Some background to explain what is happening in the photos:
The “ooze” that I work with is the soil-dwelling slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum (Dicty to its friends). Dicty spends part of its lifecycle as a unicellular amoeba that preys on bacteria. When the amoebas reach high densities and there are not enough bacteria to eat, individual amoebas send chemical signals to one another and then come together to form a multicellular slug that travels towards light. The slug then stands up and transforms into a stalk that supports a mass of spores. The spores disperse and then hatch into more amoebas. It’s pretty cool!
For the podcast to be eaten in effigy, I decided to use two bacteria to represent the podcast. I genetically engineered Klebsiella pneumoniae, a good food bacterium that we often feed to Dicty in the lab (cheaper than hogs or relatives!), to produce a green fluorescent protein (GFP). I also chose to include a strain of Paraburkholderia agricolaris that was genetically modified to produce a red fluorescent protein (RFP). Unlike Klebsiella, Paraburkholderia infects amoebas and isn’t consumed as food. One of the unique characteristics of Paraburkholderia is that it can alter the behavior of the infected amoebas, causing the amoebas to carry bacteria like Klebsiella that would otherwise be digested. Carried bacteria can be used to seed populations of prey bacteria at new sites. As a result, this behavior is sometimes called “farming” or, my favorite, “packing a lunch”.
For this... project? fan art? ?? ... I mixed Dicty spores with the two bacteria. I used this mixture to paint "HP Podcraft" on a petri plate (which was kind of challenging, since the bacteria and spores can't actually be seen at this point). After one day, the GFP labeled bacteria had grown enough to clearly form letters. By the following day, the amoebas had hatched and started to eat the bacteria, resulting in clear spaces in some of the letters. By day 4, many of the amoebas aggregated to form slugs and started traveling towards the edges of the plate, which made the letters look fuzzy where moving slugs smeared the bacteria. Slugs infected by Paraburkholderia agricolaris leave a trail of bacteria behind them as they move and, by days 5-8, bacteria in the slug trails had grown enough to make the trails visible. The RFP labeled Paraburkholderia bacteria (which looks orange in the photos) took over most of the areas where the amoebas had eaten away the GFP labeled bacteria. There are also many Dicty fruiting bodies, which stand up from the plate. I probably could have gotten the amoebas to eat more of the letters if I hadn't included the Paraburkholderia, but then I wouldn't have gotten all those cool slug trails!
I hope you have enjoyed being eaten in effigy by tiny amoebas. Thank you for the many years of wonderful podcasts! Please know that your work has contributed to the happiness and sanity of at least one amoeba-studying scientist.
Best,
letheasce
NSF postdoctoral fellow, Washington University in St. Louis
Comments
Cthulhu's D, Turning the final petri dish into a t-shirt design, especially the separate shot that foreshortens the dish into an ellipse, is something I can see listeners buying. Imagine if the bacteria and slug juice trails were printed with glow-in-the-dark ink! The creepiness could shine like a gibbous moon.
Dreadfully fantastic! And I think CthulhusDream is on to something with the idea for a t-shirt design. What’s the next step to make that happen?
Amazing and Awesome!
This is so cool
When you hear faint chanting and the lab turned into a makeshift shrine to elder gods you’ll only have yourself to blame.
Brilliant!
Psuke Bariah
Dicty has been my favorite slime mold since reading about it in the 90's, and this is the best use of it ever. Thank you!
This is one of the coolest examples of hard-core nerditry I've ever been lucky enough to witness! Kudos to you and all your varied spawn artists
That's eldritch AF
Chris Huning
What spectacular fun!
Everything about this is the greatest thing ever. Super-nerdy & super-cool. Friend Microbiologist you are a treasure
Jeez, I took the wrong classes. Very cool.
Jeremy Impson
You've doomed us all, I assume.
What a legend!!
Ha ha! This is wonderful.
Andrew M. Reichart
THIS IS FANTASTIC
This post brought me more joy than should be allowed. I’m firmly on Team Amoeba-Zombie and would absolutely wear this on a tshirt.
Jeff C. Carter
Quick, someone build a shoddy stone wall around that thing!
CthulhusDream
I think I need this as a t-shirt design
Steven Vincent
So… could I use these lil guys to custom tattoo my brain 🧠 jelly ?
I picture the zombie scenario as well but all members of the horde laugh like Chris does instead of moaning.
I used Amoeba proteus for my Bachelor's final paper, they were pretty cool while hunting, but they didn't form slugs, what a rip off!
Amazing work! Though I now dread the inevitable day when these specimens escape the lab and start infecting people like the Cordyceps fungus in a 'The Last of Us' type scenario - except, with HPPodcraft fused into their very being, as a pair of amoeba-zombies descend on their victim you can hear them cry, "What say you to TWO zombies eating your brains?!?"
