We’ve all heard the phrase “life imitates art”: a philosophical observation that real life events seem to mimic fictional occurrences found in popular media. For example, you might start reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and start noticing more and more gigantic submarines coasting alongside your local pier, or rewatch “Finding Nemo” for the umpteenth time and find a couple of tropical fish wading in the mouth of an unperturbed pelican. And researchers at the University of Rochester recognize that artistic beauty can be found even in the biology of the simplest of creatures in the ocean, such as sea sponges.
Just like art, science can also imitate life — a trend that Photonics Media readers have no doubt seen. From the Imperial College London’s Clean Energy Processes program creating a photovoltaic panel based on leaf biology and Penn State researchers learning the secrets of cloaking technology from leafhoppers, to Duke University scientists discovering a more efficient way of constructing fiber optics from a clam, sometimes natural evolution provides the foundation for our most triumphant scientific discoveries.
Courtesy of iStock.com/Noongraphicstudio and iStock.com/Lexi Claus.
As it turns out, researchers at the University of Rochester found their own inspiration from nature, when they replicated sea sponge biology to create tiny microlenses that are both light and strong. To their knowledge, this is the first time that a group has engineered light-focusing properties into bacterial cells.
But why sea sponges?
Aside from being the basis for a traditional and enduring children’s program, sea sponges naturally grow delicate, complex glass skeletons. This glass is made of silica, or bioglass, that is both lightweight and durable, allowing the sea sponges to thrive in harsh marine environments. This natural product can work as an effective substitute for the usual non-bioglass microlenses, as the manufacturing process for traditional, artificial microlenses is quite temperamental, requiring expensive machinery as well as extreme conditions to manipulate them into the desired shape.
The researchers engineered bacterial cells to express the silicatein enzyme from sea sponges, which the animals use to mineralize silica-based glass. In the process, the team developed a microscopy technique to measure the optical properties of the bacterial cells. Their study also produced mathematical models that predicted the optical properties of the glass-coated cells.
In the end, the team created bacterial microlenses that are much smaller than typically produced microlenses, inexpensively and within reasonable conditions. As these lenses are live cells that can survive for several months, the researchers also believe that they could be used to sense and respond to their environment by changing their optical properties. The researchers have recently received a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to study the effects of the materials in low-gravity environments.
And while we’re discussing another instance of science imitating life, don’t be surprised if after your next rewatch of “Finding Nemo,” an amnesiac blue regal tang fish and an ironically dower clown fish come knocking at your door to check whether you’ve seen the latter’s son.
The research was published in PNAS (www.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2409335121).