The Tetrahymena Puzzle and the Origin of Life

Over at Telic Thoughts, Bilbo had a repost of Mike Gene’s Tetrahymena Puzzle. Tetrahymena I should know is one of the model organisms in Genetics just like the Drosophila fly. After racking my sophomoric brain for two days trying to come up with an answer, I failed. Now Mike has revealed the answer over at his blog.

The Puzzle:

Lets begin by making a media with the following ingredients: amino acids, glucose, vitamins, nucleosides, salts and citrate. Next, let’s transfer a single Tetrahymena cell to 1 microliter of the media. That corresponds to a density of 1000 cells per ml. What happens? The cell does what cells do – it divides and forms a population of cells.

But what happens if you transfer a single Tetrahymena cell to 10 microliters of media (which corresponds of 100 cells per mi.)? Answer – it dies.

So why does this single-celled organism die when it is surrounded by an abundance of food and there are no predators or toxins around?

For the answer, go here.

Mnemonics for Amino Acids

I was searching around for some good Mnemonics or acronyms or anything I could find to remember the 20 essential amino acids names and structures. I found an excellent article here relating the structures of all the amino acids with easy ways to remember them. I’m going to mention things I found helpful for me here.

For those amino acids having non-polar aliphatic side chains, it was suggested that GAVLIMP as a good acronymn. For pronounciations sake it could be like:

G= Glycine

A= Alanine

Va= Valine

L= Leucine

I= Isoleucine

M= Methionine

P= Proline

Put it together, it comes to GAVa-LIMP. Thing is, the structures of the amino acids increase in complexity as you go from Glycine to Proline with Glycine having a hydrogen atom for the “R”- group while Proline has a sort of “penta-cyclic” side chain. Another way I remember this is swapping the first letters of the GAVa and LIMP to give LAVa-GIMP. Those of you that use Linux, will know that GIMP is a famous photo editing cum drawing program. So I picture the programs mascot, Wilber glowing with lava/fire!

Laminin: A view from a “scientist to be”….

I heard about this molecule called Laminin that apparently looks like a Cross. In this age of stuff appearing in tortillas and what have you, I decided to check it out. Thinking about it, I remembered one lecturer in introducing histology mentioning about this Laminin molecule in connection to molecules in the extracellular matrix. He did not elaborate on the structure of this molecule.

So I went to Google. The first item on the search takes me to a video of Louie Giglio wowing a crowd showing a “scientific diagram” of this Laminin. Needless to say that his presentation was pretty cool (though overwrought with much emotion), I wasn’t too impressed by all the skeptics/atheists flaming in the comments section of the video. It was almost like the haters had a skewed perception of what exactly is being claimed here. In fact there was a good clarification by the uploader of another one of the video