Collins Lab Blog

Right under our nose

This image, from a recent paper in Cell has got to be one of the most arresting images of scientific discovery I’ve encountered for a while.

The scanning electron micrograph is of a culture of bacterial cells and clearly shows the existence of tubes that connect the cells.

The authors call these “nanotubes” and demonstrate that these tubes can form between bacteria of the same or different species. The tubes can serve as conduits for transmission of all sorts of molecules from metabolites to proteins to plasmids. One cell can even have tubes that connect to several other cells simultaneously, creating a “multi-cell”.

No one yet knows how bacteria put these tubes to work. But the possibilities are tremendous and that’s one aspect of the discovery that’s so exciting.

If you’re a science geek, another tremendously exciting part of this discovery is that it revealed the existence of something that’s right under our noses by taking a very careful, and quantitative examination of a simple observation.

If you ask the right questions and can set up the appropriate experiments to answer those questions, there is so much to discover!

On a separate note, we were reminded of another very dramatic set of images yesterday in a superb visiting lecture from Kevan Shokat.

He showed the famous movie of a neutrophil chasing down it’s target. It’s very inspirational when one thinks about all the molecular events that underlie the neutrophil’s behavior.

I was surprised to learn after the lecture that quite a few of the students in the audience were seeing this movie for the first time.  The movie can be viewed here.

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