Plant a seed and, if the conditions are right, the seed grows. The process seems simple enough at first glance and is something many of us may feel like we learned in elementary school.
Neel Joshi, a Northeastern University associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology, says that the mechanisms are deeply complex. “To form something that’s not just a ball of cells, but has a front and a back and a top and a bottom, all those things are pretty complicated. How it limits itself, it doesn’t overgrow or undergrow. These are really difficult questions.”
In recently published research, Joshi and Ph.D. student Rong Chang modified E. coli bacteria to attach to one another in novel ways, using so-called disordered proteins to act like filaments, or fine hairs, to bind one cell to another.
Chang notes that by changing the environmental conditions around their modified E. coli — that is, changing the buffer material the E. coli resides in — the experimenters could “achieve reversible cellular organization.”
In other words, the researchers could coerce the cells to adopt a particular shape, have them take a new, second shape, and then reverse the process, returning the cells to their earlier formation.
These results, according to Chang, “have never been reported before.”
Read more at Northeastern Global News
Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
