What Happens When Worms Stick Together?

These parasites will actually stick together like Cheerios swimming in milk in a cereal bowl after a chance encounter “due to capillary force.” This observation has made Virginia Tech engineers speculate about the possible impacts on the study of biolocomotion.

Their work appears in the journal, Soft Matter, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the week of Feb. 7. Soft Matter is the premier journal in the ongoing multidisciplinary work between physics, material science, and biology. http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/sm/News/impactfactor_2009.asp

Two Harvard physicists first defined the Cheerios effect. In 2005, Dominic Vella and Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan wrote an article on this activity, defined by scientists as relating to fluid mechanics, in the Journal of Physics. They cited its usefulness in the study of self-assembly of small structures. Self-assembly is used in the science of nanotechnology.

Dominic Vella who now teaches at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, collaborated with Sunghwan “Sunny” Jung, an assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics at Virginia Tech, and his student, Sean Gart, of Salem, Va., a senior in engineering science and mechanics, and authored the new paper, “The collective motion of nematodes in a thin liquid layer.”

Their work highlights the behaviors of the nematode Panagrellus redivivus, a creature that feeds on bacteria, in a watery liquid layer that is thinner than a human hair. In this environment the nematodes crawl by creating waves that travel backwards down their body, and the force pushes them forward.

“The inspiration for the project came when we observed the nematodes crawling up the side of their container and sticking together. We knew part of the reason for this behavior was due to the capillary force, the same force that causes Cheerios to stick together in a cereal bowl, but we wanted to see whether or not the nematodes moved faster or more efficiently while stuck together,” Jung and Gart explained.

“Thin water refers to the air/liquid interface. Like Cheerios in milk, the nematodes are aggregating on top of the air surface, not on the bulk or on the bottom,” Jung said.

Gart has been working in Virginia Tech’s Biologically Inspired Fluids Laboratory directed by Jung since last summer. Gart found that the nematodes did not crawl faster or more efficiently while stuck together.

“This is an interesting behavior that has not been studied very widely in the biolocomotion field,” Jung said. “The result implies that nematodes gain neither a mechanical advantage nor disadvantage by being grouped together. The capillary forces merely keep them together after a chance encounter. This result also extends a better understanding of capillary effects in colloidal particles in engineering systems such as pickering emulsions. These emulsions are stabilized by solid particles. An example would be homogenized milk.”

Read the article at http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2011/SM/C0SM01236J

Media Contact

Lynn A. Nystrom Newswise Science News

More Information:

http://www.vt.edu

All latest news from the category: Life Sciences and Chemistry

Articles and reports from the Life Sciences and chemistry area deal with applied and basic research into modern biology, chemistry and human medicine.

Valuable information can be found on a range of life sciences fields including bacteriology, biochemistry, bionics, bioinformatics, biophysics, biotechnology, genetics, geobotany, human biology, marine biology, microbiology, molecular biology, cellular biology, zoology, bioinorganic chemistry, microchemistry and environmental chemistry.

Back to home

Comments (0)

Write a comment

Newest articles

Lighting up the future

New multidisciplinary research from the University of St Andrews could lead to more efficient televisions, computer screens and lighting. Researchers at the Organic Semiconductor Centre in the School of Physics and…

Researchers crack sugarcane’s complex genetic code

Sweet success: Scientists created a highly accurate reference genome for one of the most important modern crops and found a rare example of how genes confer disease resistance in plants….

Evolution of the most powerful ocean current on Earth

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current plays an important part in global overturning circulation, the exchange of heat and CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere, and the stability of Antarctica’s ice sheets….

Partners & Sponsors