Latest news with #MarineBiologicalLaboratory
Atlantic
23-07-2025
- Science
- Atlantic
The Sea Slug Defying Biological Orthodoxy
This week, a friend sent me our horoscope—we're both Gemini—from Seven Days, a beloved Vermont weekly, because, improbably, it was about the sea slug I'd been telling her about just days before. 'The sea slug Elysia chlorotica is a small, unassuming creature that performs a remarkable feat: It eats algae and steals its chloroplasts, then incorporates them into its own body,' the horoscope explained. Years ago I had incorporated this fact into my own view of the world, and it had changed my understanding of the rules of biology. This particular slug starts life a brownish color with a few red dots. Then it begins to eat from the hairlike strands of the green algae Vaucheria litorea: It uses specialized teeth to puncture the alga's wall, and then it slurps out its cells like one might slurp bubble tea, each bright-green cellular boba moving up the algal straw. The next part remains partially unexplained by science. The slug digests the rest of the cell but keeps the chloroplasts—the plant organelles responsible for photosynthesis—and distributes these green orbs through its branched gut. Somehow, the slug is able to run the chloroplasts itself and, after sucking up enough of them, turns a brilliant green. It appears to get all the food it needs for the rest of its life by way of photosynthesis, transforming light, water, and air into sugar, like a leaf. The horoscope took this all as a metaphor: Something I'd 'absorbed from another' is 'integrating into your deeper systems,' it advised. 'This isn't theft, but creative borrowing.' And in that single line, the horoscope writer managed to explain symbiosis—not a metaphor at all, but an evolutionary mechanism that may be more prevalent across biology than once thought. Elysia chlorotica is a bewitching example of symbiosis. It is flat, heart-shaped, and pointed at the tail, and angles itself toward the sun. Its broad surface is grooved by a web of veins, like a leaf's is. Ignore its goatish head, and you might assume this slug was a leaf, if a particularly gelatinous one. Sidney Pierce, a marine biologist retired from the University of South Florida, remembers his surprise when a grad student brought a specimen into his office in the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, more than two decades ago. Photosynthesis requires specialized equipment and chemistry, which animals simply do not have—'yet here was an animal that's figured out how to do it,' he told me. He spent the next 20-odd years trying to find the mechanism. 'Unfortunately, I didn't get all the way to the end,' he said. No one has, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu has written. The algae and the slug may have managed some kind of gene transfer, and over time, produced a new way of living, thanks not to slow, stepwise evolution—the random mutation within a body—but by the wholesale transfer of a piece of code. A biological skill leaked out of one creature into another. All of us are likely leakier than we might assume. After all, every cell with a nucleus, meaning all animal and plant cells, has a multigenetic heritage. Mitochondria—the organelles in our cells responsible for generating energy—are likely the product of an ancient symbiosis with a distant ancestor and a microbe, and have their own separate DNA. So we are walking around with the genetic material of some other ancient life form suffused in every cell. And the earliest ancestor of all plants was likely the product of a fusion between a microbe and a cyanobacterium; plants' photosynthesizing organelles, too, have distinct DNA. Lynn Margulis, the biologist who made the modern case for this idea, was doubted for years until new genetic techniques proved her correct. Her conviction about the symbiotic origins of mitochondria and chloroplasts was a monumental contribution to cell biology. But Margulis took her theory further; in her view, symbiosis was the driving force of evolution, and many entities were likely composites. Evolution, then, could be traced not only through random mutation, but by combination. 'Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing one another,' she wrote, with her son, in 1986. This remains pure conjecture, and an exaggeration of the role of symbiosis beyond what mainstream evolutionary theory would support; random mutation is still considered the main driver of speciation. Yet more scientists now wonder if symbiosis may have played a larger role in the heritage of many species than we presently understand. Phillip Cleves, a geneticist at the Carnegie Institution for Science who studies the symbiotic relationship between corals and their algae symbionts, told me how, as an undergraduate, he was blown away by the fact that corals' alliance with algae made possible ecosystems—coral reefs—that support a quarter of all known marine life. The algae cells live, whole, inside coral cells, and photosynthesize as normal, sustaining the coral in nutrient-poor tropical waters. 'I realize now that that type of interaction between organisms is pervasive across the tree of life,' he said. It's probable that the ancestors of all eukaryotes were more influenced by bacteria in their environments than modern evolutionary theory has accounted for. 'All animals and plants likely require interactions with microbes, often in strong, persistent symbiotic associations,' Margaret McFall-Ngai, a leading researcher of the role of microbes in animal development, wrote in 2024. These interactions, she argued, are so fundamental to life that the animal immune system should perhaps be thought of as a sort of management system for our many microbial symbionts. Although biology has been slow to recognize symbiosis's significance, she thinks this line of research should now take center stage, and could alter how all stripes of biologists think about their work. Cleves, too, sees himself as working to build a new field of science, by training people on how to ask genetic questions about symbiotic relationships in nature: When I called him, he was preparing to teach a four-week course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole on exactly that. Genomic research has only relatively recently been cheap enough to apply it routinely and broadly to all sorts of creatures, but now scientists can more easily ask: How do animals' interactions with microbes shape the evolution of individual species? And how does that change dynamics in an ecosystem more broadly? Elysia chlorotica is also a lesson in how easily the boundaries between an organism and its environment can be traversed. 'Every time an organism eats, a whole wad of DNA from whatever it's eating passes through the animal. So DNA gets transferred all the time from species to species,' Pierce told me. Most times it doesn't stick, but on the rare occasions when it does, it can reroute the fate of a species. 'I think it happens more than it's recognized, but a lot of times it's hard to recognize because you don't know what you're looking for. But in these slugs, it's pretty obvious,' he said. They're bright green. Still, attempts to understand what is happening inside Elysia chlorotica have mostly fallen short. Scientists such as Pierce presume that, over time, elements of the algal genome have been transferred to the slug, allowing it to run photosynthesis, yet they have struggled to find evidence. 'It's very hard to find a gene if you don't know what you're looking for,' Pierce said—plus, slug DNA is too muddled to parse a lot of the time. Slugs are full of mucus, which can ruin samples, and because the chloroplasts are embedded inside the slug cells, many samples of slug DNA end up picking up chloroplast DNA too. After years of trying, and at least one false start by a different lab, Pierce and his colleagues did manage to find a gene in the slug that was involved with chloroplast repair, hinting that a genetic transfer had occurred, and offering a clue as to how the animal manages to keep the plant organelles alive. But another research team showed that related species of photosynthesizing slugs can survive for months deprived of sunlight and actual food: They may simply be hardy. Why, then, if not to make nutrients, might the slugs be photosynthesizing? Perhaps for camouflage. Or perhaps they're stashing chloroplasts, which themselves contain useful fats and proteins, as food reserves. (Pierce, for one, is skeptical of those explanations.) Whatever benefit Elysia chlorotica derives from the chloroplasts, there couldn't be a leakier creature. It crosses the divide between plant and animal, one species and another, and individual and environment. I first read about the slug in a book titled Organism and Environment by Sonia Sultan, an evolutionary ecologist at Wesleyan University, in which she forwards the argument that we should be paying more attention to how the environment influences the way creatures develop, and how those changes are passed generationally, ultimately influencing the trajectory of species. While Elysia chlorotica is an extreme example of this, a version of it happens to us, and our bodies, all the time. Encounters with the bacteria around us reshape our microbiomes, which in turn affect many aspects of our health. Encounters with pollution can reroute the trajectory of our health and even, in some cases, the health of our offspring. Researchers think access to healthy foods—a factor of our environments—can modify how our genes are expressed, improving our lives in ways that scientists are just beginning to understand. We are constantly taking our environment in, and it is constantly transforming us.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Nikon Announces Judging Panel for the 51st Annual Small World Competition
MELVILLE, N.Y., May 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Nikon Instruments Inc. today announced the judging panel for the 2025 Nikon Small World photomicrography and Small World in Motion video competitions, which will be held June 4–5 at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. For over five decades, the Nikon Small World competition has been regarded as the premier platform for displaying the intricate beauty of life as seen through the light microscope. As in previous years, the competition will honor the top 20 photography and top 5 video winners, in addition to awarding honorable mentions and images of distinction. Submissions will be evaluated on originality, informational content, technical proficiency, and visual impact. Winners may receive up to $3,000 and international media recognition. "Every year, each member of our judging panel brings a unique perspective that helps curate a collection of images and videos that not only reflects advancements in scientific imaging and research but also sparks curiosity and wonder for a global audience," said Eric Flem, Senior Manager, Communications and CRM at Nikon Instruments. The 2025 judging panel features five top-tier experts in the fields of science and media, each of whom will leverage their diverse expertise in both science and art to evaluate which submissions best align with the competition's criteria: Deboki Chakravarti, PhD is a science writer based out of western Massachusetts who focuses on creating educational science videos and podcasts, including "Journey to the Microcosmos," "Tiny Matters," "Scishow Tangents," and "Crash Course Organic Chemistry." From designing better bike seats to existential crises inspired by amoebas, Chakravarti's work covers a wide range of subjects, all of which are tied together by her fascination with how science interacts with the culture around it. Chakravarti received her PhD in biomedical engineering from Boston University, where she worked on engineering T cells for cancer immunotherapy. Prior to that, she earned her bachelor's degree in bioengineering and English from The California Institute of Technology. Jeff DelViscio is the chief multimedia editor/executive producer at Scientific American. He is the former director of multimedia at STAT, where he oversaw all visual, audio, and interactive journalism. Before that, he spent more than eight years at The New York Times, where he worked on five different desks across the paper. DelViscio holds dual master's degrees from Columbia University in journalism and in earth and environmental sciences. He has worked aboard oceanographic research vessels and tracked money and politics in science from Washington, D.C. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in 2018–19. DelViscio's work has won numerous awards, including two News and Documentary Emmys. Andrew Moore, PhD is a postdoctoral scientist in the Lippincott-Schwartz Lab at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus who specializes in cell biology with a focus on organelle-cytoskeleton interactions. He completed his graduate training in the Holzbaur Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where he researched mitochondria quality control and dynamics. Currently, Moore's work centers on understanding how cells organize and position their organelles, particularly exploring the interactions between vimentin intermediate filaments and the endoplasmic reticulum. His research combines advanced light and volume electron microscopy techniques to delve into the complexities of cell structure and function. Moore is no stranger to Nikon Small World; he has placed six photos and six videos in the competitions since 2018 and looks forward to experiencing this year's competition from the other side of the judges' table. Liz Roth-Johnson, PhD is a scientist turned science communicator with more than a decade of experience making complex scientific ideas accessible and compelling to broad audiences. At the California Science Center, Roth-Johnson oversees the development of fun, memorable exhibit experiences that spark curiosity and inspire science learning in all ages and backgrounds. Recent projects include a Nikon Small World exhibit that explores some of the light microscopy tools and techniques scientists use to study life. Prior to her tenure at the California Science Center, Roth-Johnson created popular online food science content, reported science stories for KQED Science, consulted for the Autry Museum of the American West, and designed introductory biology courses for undergraduate students at UCLA. Roth-Johnson earned her PhD in molecular biology from UCLA and received her BA degree from UC Berkeley, where she majored in molecular & cell biology and music. She completed postdoctoral work as a Discipline-Based Education Research Fellow in the UCLA Department of Life Science Core Education. W. Gregory Sawyer, PhD is chief bioengineering officer and chair of the Department of BioEngineering at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. Professor Sawyer has published over 200 journal papers, has over 16,000 citations, holds over 20 patents, and is most proud of his numerous PhD students who are now faculty members and scientists across the globe. He was a member of the original Mars Rover Program (NASA-JPL), a speaker at TED 8, led the first space-tribology experiments on the International Space Station (ISS), developed novel biomaterials for the ocular surface, and is currently leading efforts in Cancer Engineering. The Nikon Small World in Motion video winners will be announced in late September, and the winners of the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition will be released in mid-October, 2025. For additional information, please visit and follow the competition on Facebook, LinkedIn, X (@NikonSmallWorld), Instagram (@nikonsmallworld), and Bluesky (@ About Nikon Small World Photomicrography CompetitionThe Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition is open to anyone with an interest in photography or video through the microscope. Participants may view details and upload digital images and videos directly at For additional information, contact Nikon Small World, Nikon Instruments Inc., 1300 Walt Whitman Road, Melville, NY 11747, USA, or email us at ABOUT NIKON INSTRUMENTS Instruments Inc. is the US microscopy arm of Nikon Healthcare, a world leader in the development and manufacture of optical and digital imaging technology for biomedical applications. For more information, visit or contact us at 1-800-52-NIKON. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Nikon Instruments Inc. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists achieve 3D molecular mapping with breakthrough hybrid microscope
A hybrid microscope developed at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) allows scientists to capture both the 3D orientation and position of molecular ensembles, such as labeled proteins inside cells. The microscope combines polarized fluorescence, which measures molecular orientation, with a dual-view light sheet microscope (diSPIM) that captures depth details in a sample. This technology can be useful for studying proteins, as they change their 3D orientation in response to their environment to interact with other molecules and perform their functions. According to Talon Chandler of CZ Biohub San Francisco, the study's first author and a former University of Chicago graduate student who conducted part of this research at MBL, the instrument allows researchers to record changes in 3D protein orientation. This capability provides insights that may be missed when looking only at a molecule's position. One example is imaging molecules in the spindle of a dividing cell, a challenge that has long been studied at MBL and other research institutions. The study's co-author, Rudolf Oldenbourg, a senior scientist at MBL, explained that traditional microscopy, including polarized light, can effectively image the spindle when it is perpendicular to the viewing direction. However, when the spindle is tilted, the readout becomes ambiguous. The new instrument overcomes this limitation by adjusting for tilt, allowing researchers to accurately capture both the 3D orientation and position of spindle molecules, such as microtubules. Now, the team aims to improve the system's speed to capture how the position and orientation of structures change in live samples over time. They also hope that future fluorescent probes will expand its use, allowing researchers to image a wider range of biological structures. The idea for the microscope originated in 2016 through brainstorming sessions among microscopy innovators at MBL. Hari Shroff of HHMI Janelia, then at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and an MBL Whitman Fellow, was using his custom-built diSPIM microscope at MBL, developed in collaboration with Abhishek Kumar, now at MBL. The diSPIM microscope features two imaging paths that intersect at a right angle, allowing researchers to illuminate and capture the sample from both perspectives. This dual-view approach improves depth resolution compared to a single view and provides greater control over polarization during imaging. Shroff and Oldenbourg recognized that the dual-view microscope could help overcome a limitation of polarized light microscopy - its difficulty in efficiently illuminating a sample with polarized light along the direction of light propagation. By incorporating two orthogonal views, they saw an opportunity to improve the detection of polarized fluorescence and explored using the diSPIM system for such measurements. Shroff collaborated with Patrick La Riviere from the University of Chicago, whose student Talon Chandler joined the project at MBL. Chandler's doctoral thesis focused on integrating the two systems, working in Oldenbourg's lab for a year. The team, including Shalin Mehta, outfitted the diSPIM with liquid crystals to control input polarization direction. Chandler dedicated a significant amount of time to exploring how to reconstruct the data and maximize what could be recovered from it. Co-author Min Guo, then at Shroff's previous lab at NIH, also worked extensively on this aspect, and together, they achieved their goal of full 3D reconstructions of molecular orientation and position.
