2015/05/15 by Raymond E. Goldstein, Jan-Willem van de Meent · 4 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Neuroscience · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques #Artificial intelligence #Computer science #Data science #Perspective (graphical) #Photoreceptor and optogenetics research #Slime Mold and Myxomycetes Research #cond-mat.soft #physics.bio-ph #q-bio.SC
paper · pdf · doi:10.1098/rsfs.2015.0030
published as Interface Focus 5, 20150030 (2015) · 17 pages, 5 figures. Contribution to a theme issue of Interface Focus on "Bioinspiration of new technologies" and Royal Society meeting. See https://royalsociety.org/events/2015/05/bioinspiration-of-new-technologies/
openalex publication_date 2015/05/15 · arxiv created 2015/05/19 · arxiv updated 2015/05/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Organisms show a remarkable range of sizes, yet the dimensions of a single cell rarely exceed 100 µm. While the physical and biological origins of this constraint remain poorly understood, exceptions to this rule give valuable insights. A well-known counterexample is the aquatic plant Chara, whose cells can exceed 10 cm in length and 1 mm in diameter. Two spiralling bands of molecular motors at the cell periphery drive the cellular fluid up and down at speeds up to 100 µm s(-1), motion that has been hypothesized to mitigate the slowness of metabolite transport on these scales and to aid in homeostasis. This is the most organized instance of a broad class of continuous motions known as 'cytoplasmic streaming', found in a wide range of eukaryotic organisms-algae, plants, amoebae, nematodes and flies-often in unusually large cells. In this overview of the physics of this phenomenon, we examine the interplay between streaming, transport and cell size and discuss the possible role of self-organization phenomena in establishing the observed patterns of streaming.