Small World Speaks

I've seen those guys a lot.

When looking at some random water samples from local ponds, the sample size was always too small to do something meaningful with it.

Until we had guest scientists at Janelia. We have this  visitor scientist program. People can come and use our advanced imaging center. And when they left, they left behind a whole bottle full of a very dense culture of Stentors and they asked me if I want to do something with it.

I was like, "Yes, of course." And I found this publication from the ’60s about how to… The problem with this type of organism is it collapses into a ball of pro-protoplasm as soon as it detects some kind of noxious chemical in the environment. It's super sensitive. But I wanted to image it in its extended form, the way it looks when it's swimming, which is, turned out it's not trivial.

But it worked. It worked not in 100% of cases, but I had maybe like 20% success rate, which is huge when you have thousands of those guys swimming around.

You know, I was processing them in bulk, of course, so I selected the good ones. And, yeah, it worked beautifully. And then I got a lot of correspondence from people studying microorganisms, asking me how did I do it, and I was very happy to share my method.