Clockwork-Like ‘Computer’ Discovered Inside Brainless Microscopic Organism
October 14th, 2022Via: ScienceAlert:
Tiny single-celled critters obviously don’t have room for a brain to tell them how to move in complex ways, so to get about, they usually roll, slither or swim.
But microscopic pond dwellers called Euplotes eurystomus have mastered a way to walk brainlessly – scurrying about like insects, with their 14 little appendages.
They appear to move a bit like the Dutch-designed kinetic sculptures called Strandbeasts, with clockwork-like connections cycling them through a pattern of set states that can be adjusted in response to their environment.
“There seemed to be this sequential logic happening with the movements,” says biophysicist Ben Larson from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). “They weren’t random, and we began to suspect there was some sort of information processing happening.”
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So rather than brains and nerves, these single-celled creatures are controlled by networks of signaling molecules.
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“This is a really fascinating biological phenomenon itself, but also could highlight more general computational processes in other types of cells,” says Larson.
