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. Read the rest of this entry »
