This is NOT a Biodiversity Roundup, because that feature does not exist.
I mean, there COULD be a regular Biodiversity Roundup that would be fun to learn about and write, but this is definitely not that.
It’s just that looking through the recent news I was struck a few times by examples of how much we have to learn from nature and why we must do our best to maintain biodiversity.
This also sort of happened to me a couple of weeks ago with skunk pee. In any event, here’s what I found:
Tiny shrimp invents modern optical device
There’s a very cool and useful optical tool called a fiber Bragg grating that we humans thought we invented in 1978. If you shine white light at it, it reflects back just one color, allowing the rest of the light to pass through. According to a recent finding at the University of Cambridge (UK), it turns out that a tiny shrimp called Nannosquillidae actually thought of it first. It’s now the only known organism to have this feature.
How does a fiber Bragg grating work? It’s inside an optical fiber, and it has a layer-cake section within it. Instead of sponge and frosting, though, you have the fiber material alternating with a second material, one with a different refractive index. The layers are really close together, on the order of the wavelengths of visible light (0.00002 inches or so).
Whenever light hits a material with a different refractive index, some of that light gets reflected. If you shine a flashlight at a window, about 8% of it is going to get reflected back at you. A little bit of light reflects back like that off of each layer in this grating. Some lucky wavelength of light is going to be just right to coincide with the spacing of the grating, and its waves are going to add together to form bigger waves going backwards. That’s going to be the color of light that gets reflected back out.
One especially cool feature of the Bragg grating is that if you stretch it or compress it, the spacing changes, and a different color gets reflected. That means you can use it to detect small forces and small temperature changes, because those things will cause the spacing to expand or contract.
Nannosquillidae’s eye has the same kind of device within it. If you shine white light at this shrimp’s eye, it reflects only yellowish-green light back at you:
The reflection of yellowish light is thought to help Nannosquillidae focus on its prey: bioluminescent organisms, which often glow blue. Who needs that distracting yellow light hitting your retina? It’s not clear whether the shrimp can stretch the filter to change the reflected color, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
If you haven’t seen bioluminescence in the ocean, by the way, it can be quite a sight:
The light-producing reation requires oxygen, and when the seawater gets disturbed, oxygen dissolves in it, so you get a lot more light. I don’t think the shrimp would need too much help when it’s this bright!
Bacteria pulls nifty trick to invade plants, could help us fight cancer
Plants are full of sugar and nutrients, and bacteria want those things. But plants are pretty good at recognizing intruders like bacteria and activating self-destruction of the tissues that those intruders have gotten into. This plant hasn’t been so lucky, though:
Researchers in Dallas, Texas and Warsaw, Poland have teamed up to find a previously unknown way that bacteria trick the plant and disable its defense systems.
A key part of the plant’s machinery to recognize intruders is a family of proteins called kinases. These kinases are triggered by foreign molecules, and when they are, they go and add a phosphate group to other defense proteins to wake them up and activate them. Kind of like little Paul Reveres.
But kinases need help in developing their structure. They have to be folded correctly to work. Another protein called a “chaperone” helps them fold properly, and a really important chaperone is Hsp90:
This thing is really central to a plant’s defense system, and bacteria have figured out a way to sneak up on it and punch it out.
They start by injecting stuff into plant cells using these ungodly devices called T3SS:
One of the things they inject into the plant is a protein called HopBF1. It poses as a kinase that is incompletely folded, and it strolls up to Hsp90 to ask for help in folding right. HopBF1 is a kinase, all right — but as soon as Hsp90 docks with it, it adds a phosphate group to Hsp90 that permanently destroys its activity!
That is so Land Shark!
Now that we understand this, it could help us defend crops from bacteria better. But it could also help fight cancer!
It turns out that cancer cells rely on Hsp90 (yes, humans have it, too!) especially heavily to stabilize proteins that are needed for tumor activity. That’s why Hsp90 is currently a very hot target for cancer drug trials. One drug that has shown some promise in this area is geldanamycin, which is itself a natural product from the bacterium Streptomyces hygroscopicus. It inhibits Hsp90 pretty well, but it has a number of disqualifyingly bad side effects, so alternatives are being sought with alacrity right now. HopBF1 could be a nifty candidate because it’s so dastardly specific in what it does.
A shapeshifting jellyfish that is … well, totally nuts
You might be familiar with Nautilus Live, which has been exploring the seafloor for more than 10 years. They just wrapped up a segment at Baker & Howland Islands on Sept. 16...
...and during that one they had a rare sighting of Deepstaria, a type of jellyfish that can expand from a compact little cone to a huge transparent sheet the size of your carpet. You’ll see that whole progression in this video:
I can’t add much over the marine biologists (who sound quite captivated), but they use a couple of terms that help explain the special nature of this creature:
“geometric mesh” — the network you can see in the jellyfish’s structure that delivers nutrients throughout the body and serves as a scaffold for it to expand to many, many times its original size
“resident isopod” — a crustacean found inside the jellyfish (that big, red dot); we don’t know whether it’s a cooperative relationship, whether the isopod is a parasite, or whether the jellyfish is just digesting it.
Now, wouldn’t controllable materials like this be pretty amazing?
Whew!
This has NOT been a Biodiversity Roundup, because there is no such thing as that.