Assignment to be handed in Wednesday (October 14)

 

Imagine that you owned an "atomic force microscope" with which you could poke tiny micro-needles into the surfaces of living amoebae, and then read off a dial the sizes of resisting forces.

For your choice of any three of the different categories of amoebae described on the web pages for this course, and shown in the time-lapse video pictures, invent a series of experiments to do on these amoebae using the atomic force microscope.
Your list of proposed experiments can also make use of the silicone rubber substratum method for making cellular forces visible as wrinkles.

For example, suggest placing the micro-needle at one or more different places relative to the front of an Amoeba proteus, as it crawls along, and measuring forces exerted in which different directions. What ideas would you test? What would your hypotheses predict about locations, directions and relative strengths of forces exerted by amoebae, or by one part of an amoeba relative to another?

For the purposes of this assignment, consider that the different kinds of amoebae are
a) Amoeba proteus.
b) Vanella (the gliding ones)
c) Difflugia (the ones with the shells).
d) Physarum, the multicellular ones that ate the piece of oatmeal.
e) Dictyostelium (the ones that aggregate, and form the multicellular "slugs")
f) Sponge cells
g) Cancer cells, and also the non-cancerous cells in the cultures with them.
h) The cell shown dividing in mitosis. (in the sense of designing experiments to study how cells divide, rather than how cells crawl).

Choose any 3 out of this total of 8, and propose a series of experiments for each of your chosen three.

 

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