Camouflage is one of the most useful skills in the wild, an ability that squids and octopuses have mastered. Researchers have tried developing it in laboratories but there are some parts of how they become reversibly transparent that remain unclear.
SciTech Daily reported that researchers from the University of California, Irvine, successfully replicated the tunable transparency of squid cells in human cells that can be cultured and could lead to better imaging at the cellular level.
Making Materials Inspired By Squid Skin Cells
Alon Gorodetsky, Ph.D., and his research team have been working on materials inspired by squid for many years. In previous work, they created "invisibility stickers" out of bacterially generated squid reflectin proteins bonded to adhesive tape.
Gorodetsky, the project's senior investigator, said that it inspired them to explore if it is possible to capture some components of squid skin tissues' capacity to change transparency within human cell cultures.
Together with his team at the University of California, Irvine, they focused on cephalopod cells known as leucophores that have particulate-like nanostructures that are made up of reflectin proteins that scatter light. This protein usually clumps together and forms nanoparticles that scatter light or bounce off of them to make leucophores look bright white.
They wanted to engineer mammalian cells to stably form reflecting nanostructures to better control the scattering of light because these cells allow a transparent appearance. On the other hand, cells can become opaque and more apparent by scattering a lot more light. They also thought that they could alter the cell's transparency relative to its surroundings at a cellular level.
To do that, they introduced squid-derived genes that encoded reflection in human cells. In their experiment, they added salt to the cells' culture media and waited for reflection to clump together into nanostructures. When they increased the salt concentration, nanoparticles became larger and the amount of light that bounced off the cells also increased.
The findings will be presented by the researchers at the American Chemical Society's spring conference (ACS), which is a hybrid meeting that will take place digitally and in person March 26-30, with over 10,000 presentations on a wide range of science issues.
Improving Experiment Methods to Better Understand Squid Skin Cells
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, researchers were left wondering what they could do to advance their investigation even though they are not in their laboratories. As per a similar report in the Science Daily, during the lockdown, they developed computational models that could predict the expected light scattering of light and transparency before it is run in the laboratory.
Gorodetsky suggests that, on a basic level, the results of their study will help better understand squid skin cells that were not yet cultured in a laboratory setting.
Previous researchers postulated that reflection nanoparticles could disassemble and reassemble to change the transparency of leucophores, but a recent study showed this could also be possible in human cells by changing salt concentration.
The team is now working to optimize its technique to design a better cellular imaging strategy based on the intrinsic optical properties of cells.
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