An enzyme in a cyanobacterium can take the unusual form a triangle containing ever-smaller triangular gaps, making a fractal pattern.
By Alex Wilkins
An international team of researchers led by groups from the Max Planck Institute in Marburg and Phillips University in Marburg has now discovered the first regular molecular fractal in nature. They discovered a microbial enzyme—citrate synthase from a cyanobacterium—that spontaneously assembles into a regular fractal pattern known as the Sierpiński triangle. This is an infinitely repeating series of triangles made up of smaller triangles.
“We stumbled on this structure completely by accident and almost couldn’t believe what we saw when we first took images of it using an electron microscope,” says first author Franziska Sendker.
“The protein makes these beautiful triangles and as the fractal grows, we see these larger and larger triangular voids in the middle of them, which is totally unlike any protein assembly we’ve ever seen before,” she continues.
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Lund University are amazed by the discovery of a bristle worm that possesses eyesight as acute as that of mammals. They suspect that they may have a secretive language, only seen by their own species.
The Vanadis bristle worm has eyes as big as millstones – relatively speaking. Indeed, if our eyes were proportionally as big as the ones of this Mediterranean marine worm, we would need a big sturdy wheelbarrow and brawny arms to lug around the extra 100kg.
As a set, the worm’s eyes weigh about twenty times as much as the rest of the animal’s head and seem grotesquely out of place on this tiny and transparent marine critter. As if two giant, shiny red balloons have been strapped to its body.